Aprons and Axes

Public interest in accounts of quaint Mennonite life is matched only by public interest in stories of rebellious Mennonite adolescence. Thankfully, Carla Funk’s Mennonite Valley Girl: A Wayward Coming of Age refuses to pander to either appetite. Funk, who served as Victoria’s inaugural poet laureate from 2006 to 2008, has recently turned to narrative non-fiction, and she writes with an unpretentious, almost effortless style. Largely set in the logging town of Vanderhoof, in the British Columbia Interior, in the early 1980s, her personal essays are sturdy, stand-alone pieces that hang on “that hinge of adolescence,” where she recalls herself “easing out of the awkward, oily surge of puberty and into the cocky cynicism of youth.”

Readers who are led astray by this book’s title — those looking, perhaps, for a salacious, bonnet-busting tell‑all — will be disappointed. (Spoiler...