An insightful review of The Shadows takes up a full page of the July-August 2016 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, which of course I was delighted to see. “Wayman’s affection for the people of the valley permeates his stories,” Lesley Krueger writes. “Wayman’s collection reads like nothing so much as a warped 21^st century version of Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa.” The reviewer pairs a couple of Leacock’s characters in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) to characters in The Shadows.

The review concludes: “Wayman’s collection is different from many recent books of stories in its tenderness toward his characters.… A human book, The Shadows We Mistake for Love, looks at the Slocan Valley and says, this is what it is like. Which is a fine thing for a writer to say, perhaps the only thing. Listen, Wayman says. This is what it is like for me.”