In this engaging piece of historical fiction for older children/younger teenagers, Gaetz tells the story of 13-year-old Emma Curtis. It is 1862, and the young girl and her seriously ill mother, Jenny, have been laid off from a Manchester spinning mill. With the American Civil War raging, there’s no cotton being shipped to England from the American South, and the factory has had to be temporarily shuttered. The mother and daughter are in dire straits. With no money coming in, they can barely manage to purchase the stale bread a kindly baker offers at a much-reduced price, never mind pay the rent for their squalid lodgings. Before she dies, Jenny makes Emma promise she will never go into a workhouse (a crucial key to survival) and that she will always make an effort to speak proper English (a route to upward mobility). Emma receives the ring her father gave her mother as well as some notes her mother recorded in cursive, which tell something of the family history. Unfortunately, Emma’s schooling has been very limited; she is essentially illiterate.

After wandering out of Manchester, the frightened, cold, and starving girl is taken in by a warm-hearted woman, a parson’s wife. Eventually the woman and her clergyman husband arrange for Emma to travel on a “bride ship” to one of the newest colonies: British Columbia. It’s all part of a charitable enterprise funded by the (real-life) Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, an English woman who uses her considerable inheritance to keep impoverished young girls out of prostitution and provide them with other opportunities. The British colonies are in need of young women like Emma to become wives of the many adventuring men already living there. The women are expected to exert a peaceable, Christian influence on settlements.

After a three-month ocean journey, Emma arrives in Victoria, BC, and is lucky enough to be selected by Governor Douglas’s wife, Amelia, a woman of Cree ancestry, to work in the Douglas household as a servant. Now safe, Emma begins to have dreams about a life of adventure and freedom. However, a series of coincidences cause the girl to make some surprising discoveries about her mother’s and her own history. They will prove to be life-changing

Gaetz effectively interweaves a lot of 19th-century British Columbian history and some interesting real-life figures into Emma’s story. She provides more information about these people in an appendix. Gaetz also (less effectively) incorporates some Victorian vocabulary into her book and a glossary that can be consulted to understand the unfamiliar words. Frankly, I don’t know why she bothered including obscure language in a book intended for children. The words are, for the most part, no longer in use and therefore of little value to a middle-school student. They don’t even add much flavour. The annoyance of looking up the terms outweighs any added authenticity.

As an adult, I noticed echoes of Bronte’s Jane Eyre in the book; Emma can be as fierce and outspoken as Jane, whose story is, in fact, read aloud to her at one point in the story. There are also shades of Dickens. Yes, the book is slightly predictable, even a little formulaic, for an adult, and there are a few too many parsons in the pudding. However, I still think that certain girls I know would enjoy the story. It shines a light on a bit of BC history that I wasn’t familiar with. ( )