[The Young in One Another's Arms] is a rather dreadful piece of writing, about a one-armed woman about to be evicted from the Vancouver boarding house which she owns and which has been marked down by urban renewal. Presumably Rule intends Vancouver in particular, and the society of North American cities in general, to stand for what Yeats calls "no country for old men." But the machine-ruled, police-run world she describes hardly does well by birds in the trees or by the young, either. She sees the stereotypes of her boarding house, related as they are by weakness and by the bonds of affection rather than by legal ties and blood lines, as a new, ideal version of the human family, and she traces their sailing to Byzantium, their flight from demolition to Galiano Island. The multi-racial, cosmo-sexual, four-generation structure of the new family unit is threatened from...