“Michelle Porter and Bridget Canning, in two of the strongest entries in the book, make it clear that they are aware of how memory shapes story… This is especially effective in Porter’s case, as her sisterly tale of narrowly avoiding sexual molestation as children is repeatedly framed by time and memory. It’s a true story, but it’s also a gothic story, one in which Porter doesn’t realize she was the hero until she’s an adult, in the frame narrative, talking on the phone to the sister she saved. That frame provides a pleasing irony: the helpless female heroines of the British gothic were always repeatedly framed in narratives meant to lend verisimilitude to the story of barely thwarted rape by cruel aristocratic Catholic uncles. Porter’s true story of the neighbourhood pervert provides a similar frame but conveys its reality via subjective judgment rather than locating it in the fixed text of the dusty, lost manuscript of so many gothic and horror tales… The writing [in Best Kind] is strong and consistent throughout, and the book reads briskly… These are some good stories, stories that make us think about how stories — fiction and non-fiction alike — depend on the mind and the tongue of the teller.”