Fiction writers in Prince Edward Island have lived for so long in the shadow of Lucy Maud Montgomery that it’s difficult to imagine what life out from under that shadow would look like. This anthology is not an attempt to relegate LMM to the sidelines—nor does it set out to dispel or even diminish her influence—but it does represent a confident step away from a shadow that now stretches deep into the 21st century. In these pages editor Richard Lemm (a PEI-based poet, scholar and fiction writer of some repute) has assembled a bold collection of short fiction that owes more to 20th-century dirty realism than anything else. The authors of these stories come from varied backgrounds. Some have been writing for decades; others have only recently tried their hand at fiction. Interestingly, many contributors are not native Islanders, having traveled from elsewhere to settle on PEI, or else paused for a time on the Island in their pursuit of a life somewhere else. The stories in Riptides reflect this geographical and demographic variety and are the richer for it. All of the stories are diverting and engaging and worth reading, though admittedly some are more polished than others. Standouts include Melissa Carroll’s “The Nothing,” set in a gritty urban world of menial labour, lottery tickets and sexual confusion, “The Subversives” by Valerie Compton, in which a man encounters a poignant reminder of a girl he had been infatuated with years earlier, and Helen Pretulak’s “Final Farewell,” in which through various machinations a woman returns to her childhood home within the contamination zone of Chornobyl. In his introduction Lemm refers to a “PEI fiction renaissance” and comments that the authors collected here have not been motivated to write in emulation of Lucy Maud Montgomery but because they have stories to tell that are personal, urgent and thoroughly modern. The sustained high quality of this collection serves as notice that there is work being produced today by PEI writers that stands very well on its own and demands our attention, and which owes nothing to Montgomery’s literary legacy. ( )