Penguin has created an engrossing new series of historical fiction called Our Canadian Girl. Each of the series’ books imagines a 10-year-old girl’s reactions to a particular historical situation: the 1885 Montreal smallpox epidemic in Kathy Stinson’s Dark Spring, Chinese immigration to 1896 Victoria in Julie Lawson’s Across the James Bay Bridge, the 1917 Halifax explosion in Sharon E. McKay’s Terror in the Harbour. The first four in the series are all well written and exciting, but Lynn Kositsky in A Mighty Big Imagining best succeeds in creating fully developed characters.
Her heroine, Rachel, and her family have escaped slavery on a rice plantation in South Carolina by supporting the Loyalists in the American Revolution. In 1783, Rachel’s stepfather is shipped to Nova Scotia where Rachel and her pregnant mother later join him. Rachel is shocked that, even as free British subjects, blacks still suffer from racist taunts and terrible physical privation. But she’s sustained through the bleak winter by her blossoming friendship with a native girl and her determination to learn to read and write.
Kositsky economically creates a complex heroine. Bent on improving her lot through self-education, Rachel copies the way her social betters speak and seizes any opportunity to learn her letters. She also works toward greater tolerance of the characters around her, all deftly drawn: her mother, cranky through exhaustion, her taciturn stepfather, her demanding newborn brother, and her inquisitive neighbour.
Kositsky vividly depicts the horrible conditions that Rachel’s family endures, living in a five-foot-deep pit in the frozen ground. The domestic circumstances revealed in this novel, and the three others, will be a remarkable eye-opener to Canadian girls now.
The format of the books – with illustrations set out like the plates in Victorian novels, timelines, and invaluable forewords – gives young readers a sense of context, completing the impression of a journey back in time.