One of the liabilities of our having made a quick jaunt to Toronto recently is that, while Pam was off businessing for the day, I was within easy walking distance of, er, three -- countem, THREE -- good bookshops. My rucksack was interestingly . . . heavy on the way home: a good thing we did the journey by train rather than 'plane. But the good thing about the bookshops was that they offered a distinctively different selection of books than I'm accustomed to seeing here in NJ, and so I was able to pick up this Canadian YA time-travel novel. And jolly good it is too.

13-year-old gloomyguts brat Darby is sent to spend a few weeks with her grandparents in "one-lobster town" Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and immediately assumes she's going to have a ghastly time of it. But then she runs into the mysterious boy Gabe, who lives in the big blue house on the corner even though everyone assumes that house is derelict. Still whingeing in her customary way, Darby allows Gabe to lead her to the ruined chapel in the blue house's big garden; on stepping with him through the gaping window she is transported back through time, to a prehistoric era where the ancestors of the Inuit survive as best they can in a glaciated Canada. Gabe is a member of the little clan among which Darby finds herself, and apparently always has been; she herself has a different status in that she has a sort of weak interaction with the physical world, whereby she can't influence it (humans aside from Gabe are unaware of her presence and animals have just a vague inkling that she's there) but it can influence her -- if she falls over she hurts herself. During one of her later trips she realizes the nub of it: "She was a ghost from another time" (p127).

She spends a couple of days with the proto-Inuit, then is directed toward a means of getting home to her own time. In each of her two subsequent trips -- one to a coffin ship come to Canada bearing immigrants from Ireland and plagued witrh smallpox and typhus, the other aboard a much more civilized immigrant vessel, carrying one of her ancestors -- the pattern continues of Gabe, her guide, being already present in, and playing an active role in, the world while Darby herself has just a ghostly presence and, at visit's end, must find a portal to be able to escape homeward. Meanwhile, between trips, Darby is learning about her own and Charlottetown's history, learning to relate to her idiosyncratic Nan and, as he descends into Alzheimers, Gramps, and (no prizes for guessing this bit) generally growing up to a much nicer child than when she came to Prince Edward Island just a few short weeks ago. The events of her real life, and the lives of those around her, are not trivial; but what she has witnessed during her cross-temporal journeys helps her cope with them, if for no other reason than that, however grim things might get for her in the 21st century, she's come face-to-face with worse elsewhen.

The book has it moments of humour, as when the still rather prissy, self-absorbed Darby at one point goes through the reasons why her latest temporal sojourn isn't a dream:

"Two: Shoes do not get soaked in dreams." Well, unless you counted that unfortunate time when she was four and mistook her mother's closet for the bathroom in the middle of the night. But hey, she was a little kid. (p117)

We never do discover who Gabe really is, which is just fine: that's what you'd expect of an elemental, after all. Less satisfyingly, there's another kid whom Darby encounters a couple of times in modern Charlottetown: he serves no plot purpose and seems just to get forgotten about. And I did get rattled when what's been established archaeological knowledge for decades was described half-dismissively as "some professor who had a theory that the way the first native people came to North America was over a land bridge on the Bering Strait" (p84). Otherwise I enjoyed this adventure just fine . . . although I did wonder if its intended YA readership would like it as much as I did, if they might find it a bit -- gasp! -- educational in feel. Well, if so, that's their tough luck: the book worked just fine for moi.

Kind of shameful GoodReads doesn't have a cover pic for this one, isn't it? Or maybe the shame is that no publisher has picked up the US or UK rights. Who knows? I'm just damn' glad my visit to Toronto enabled me to find a copy.
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