Pamela Donoghue's first collection of stories, Comfort Zones (Polestar First Fiction) consists of seventeen stories, most of which revolve around a Cape Breton family. Donoghue's characters don't reach great personal epiphanies and they move through life analyzing their surroundings and those around them, while unaware of themselves. The overall work is not fully realized, but the wry observations and musings of Donoghue's characters (one ponders "the number of yellow Corvettes compared to the population" of an Alberta boom town in the seventies and eighties, drew me into the stories and left a lasting impression.