Sunshine Sketches is a portrait of small-town Canadian life in the early twentieth century. Mariposa represents a past to be cherished, a pastoral and idyllic town that allows for human folly. If there is any satire, it is immediately bathed in warm sunshine. Athough Sunshine Sketches has the complexity of a novel, it is more properly defined as a short- story cycle. A vital force is the book's narrator, who is at times intimately close to the comings and goings of Mariposa life, but distant enough to sustain the focus on human folly