[Lives of Girls and Women] is not, the author says, autobiographical except in form. In fact, in form it more closely resembles a series of short stories, and it is no surprise to see that the author won a Canadian award in this genre. Each chapter of Lives of Girls and Women is virtually self-contained; characters who appear in more than one are nearly always reintroduced, however well we might reasonably be supposed to remember them. Yet each protagonist is closely connected with the central family; Del Jordan, the daughter, is the narrator throughout and though she is not the heroine of every episode it is very much her story. The first chapter, it is true, is set at a decided angle to the main narrative line; its hero, Uncle Benny, appears only peripherally in the later chapters—and his vicious mail-order bride never—but the effect is intriguing rather than confusing.

The title is accurate, for the book presents not only the growing up of a girl, her relationships with her family and her approaches and eventual introduction to sexual experience, but also the histories of her female contemporaries and older relatives, especially her mother. In other words, we are in Kinflicks country, but whereas Kinflicks tries, too hard for its artistic good, to be a, or even the, Great American Novel, Lives of Girls and Women obeys its own natural range and scope and is consequently much more successful. Neither does it fall flat into the long, lush grass of so many British autobiographies and novels about country adolescence. It is an honest book….

The beginnings and endings of some of the chapters weirdly recall, if not the exact voice of Penguin New Writing, a good parody of it: "We spent days along the Wawanash River, helping Uncle Benny fish."… The best of the sexual scenes are completely explicit; their straightforwardness is necessary and the reverse of bawdy…. Alice Munro knows when not to be explicit; the often puzzled loves of the young are more reticently portrayed.

The book draws a clear distinction between youthful and adult emotional attitudes even when exactly the same things are happening….

One of the few criticisms that can be made of the book is that it often explains too much. The writing is in fact good enough to rely much more on implication than it allows itself to do.