THE MISSING CHILD Sandra Birdsell. Toronto, ON: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989. 320pp., cloth, $24.95. ISBN 0-88619-242-0. CIP. Adult Reviewed by Melanie Fogel. Volume 18 Number 1 1990 January According to her publicity, Sandra Birdsell's short stories about the fictional town of Agassiz, Manitoba, were widely acclaimed. It doesn't say for what. The Missing Child also takes place in Agassiz, a hamlet populated by thoroughly unlikeable, uninteresting and unsanitary characters whose main preoccupation seems to be thinking and saying unpleasant things about each other. Their pasts and present are detailed simultaneously, so that the reader has to contend with not only what is happening when but also with sentences like this: "But the hope was quenched beneath the probing of Jacob's eyes that were the colour of ice on the river in winter reflecting back the sky at the end of the day, the white ice becoming a colder tinge of blue, shadows only differing shades of blue, growing darker as the sun waned." There is no plot, merely an assemblage of occurrences that range from the distasteful to the disgusting. Life in Agassiz is unrelentingly boring, crud and ugly, lacking the dramatic vision to make it tragic. The only comic relief in the whole book is an ethnic slur. Melanie Fogel, Ottawa, ON.