I read Bang Crunch, Neil Smith's debut collection of short stories (published by Knopf Canada), on a train, on my way to visit a grieving friend. Her partner had died: Too young, too soon, too good for it to be fair. I would read a story and glance out the window, at the gray, industrial world by the tracks, and I would think about how life is so beautiful and cruel, all at once. Then, I would return to the pages, to Smith's enchantingly wrenching tales of striving and failure, wrapped in a blanket of beautiful melancholy as the train rocked me back and forth.

Smith's stories are full of broken-hearted dreamers, people in the midst of being struck by the realization that the world is not what it should be. From the opening salvo, "Isolettes," in which a parent's idealized view of parenthood is shattered by medical complications and emotional ambivalence, to the parting shot from Madeline, an avenger of ordinariness, in "Jaybird," these stories are full of hospitals and broken hearts. Each tale manages to be both stark and tender, like a punch in the face followed by the aid of a stranger.

Much of the solace comes from the bittersweet imagery in Smith's writing. There is hair the colour of construction boots and a "rain puddle look" on a dissed boy's face. A scrapbooker explains away her failed attempt at journal-keeping: "Words simply toddled across the page like a string of daycare tots." Smith's writing about Montreal makes me want to make a return visit to the city; when it appears, it is often a character in its own right.

Montreal is most highlighted in "Green Fluorescent Protein," perhaps my favourite story in the collection. ("Isolettes" and "B9ers" are also in contention.) "Green Fluorescent Protein" is a coming of age story (sexuality, family upheaval) about the meaning of beauty, and about technology, and about the way in which we manipulate our world. I fell for Max almost instantly; just-the-way-it-is observations like this one sealed the deal:

The nurse's name is Charlotte, a pretty, twenty-year-old girl who probably didn't get cast as Juliet because she's black and fat.