Last Chance to Renew

The short-story collection "Last Chance to Renew" by Scott Randall is a rare jewel. If Alice Munro were a man, she would be Scott Randall. The stories are set in southern Ontario, from the Ottawa Valley to the Toronto area. They examine the small moments in ordinary lives with the exacting detail and intimate characterization that Munro has honed to a fine art. This uniquely female storytelling style coupled with a focus on the intimate lives of women has found a huge audience with book-buyers who are, demographically speaking, middle- to upper-middle-class women in their 30s and 40s. But rarely are women given glimpses into the minds of ordinary, middle-class men, often not even their own husbands. Randall uses the "feminine" style and subject matter of popular female authors to see into the minds of men coping with the same problems of marriage, pregnancy, home-buying, child-rearing and widowhood as their wives, but looking at it from their perspective.