Book of the Year: Lives of Girls and Women

It's not the book of the year in the sense that it was published in 2007; I think the only new release I read this year was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Rather, I thought I'd review my favourite book that I read in 2007, no matter when it was first released. And that was Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.
The book is about a young girl growing up in a rural Ontario town. Munro's talent is to find universal thoughts or feelings in everyday activities. Though I did not grow up in a rural town, Munro makes me see what it would be like; I did grow up in Canada, and I can recognize some aspects of that in her book. Even if you did neither, the process of growing up for the protagonist will surely encompass situations and thoughts that you will recognize, either in yourself or people you know - or likely both.
Lives of Girls and Women was the second book by Munro. She is primarily known as a short story writer, but the copy of my book advertises it as Munro's only novel. That is a little misleading; although the story does follow one character, Del Jordan, it does not really have a central plot, like one might expect from a novel. It reads more like a series of short stories. The events in one story carry over to another story, but generally don't play a big role. For example, in one story, Del's uncle dies; the story explore the young Del's attempts to understand and deal with death. In the later parts of the book, Del's aunts are described living in the house they moved to after the death of the uncle, but the death itself plays no major role outside of the one story.
The lack of a central connecting story makes it a more realistic portrait of growing up. For most of us, our youth is not a cohesive narrative leading to a climax; rather, it's a series of experiences, all of which inform our later life. That's what happens to Del. In "Age of Faith", she confronts religion. Her father belongs to the United Church; her mother is aggressively agnostic, something that sets her apart in rural Canada. Up until now, when Del is about 13, she has just accepted this, but now she tries to work things out for herself. She even goes so far as to sneak off to the Anglican Church in town. Like most of the rest of the stories in the book, it doesn't end with clear-cut answers (how could it, when dealing with something like religion?), but I understood what Del was thinking and feeling as she tried to sort her way through the philosophical issues. And although this episode is not explicitly referred to again in the later stories, I understood how it affected Del and her outlook on life.
The stories end with Del's graduation from high school, although there is an epilogue where a grownup Del returns to her hometown and reflects on the impression it made on her. Del is interested in literature, and wants to be a writer. Munro has said the book has similarities to her own childhood, although it is not an autobiography. Regardless of how similar it is to Munro's own experiences, however, Lives of Girls and Women established the author as one of the greats in Canadian literature because it highlights her unparalleled ability to relate extraordinary insights through events that will sound familiar to just about everyone.