Alms is set in the 1980s in Toronto. Its sad-sack protagonist, Martine Craythorn, describes her people as “the late-century rich – back-patters and horse-laughers.” In an age of ambition and acquisition, Martine is obsessed only with what it means to be good. At 23, having survived a childhood addiction to Catholicism, she is still living with her well-moneyed, fragile mother, struggling to find a job that will allow her to help the “porepeople” and be commended for it.

Upper-class guilt and philanthropy is a topic rich for the mining, and author Cynthia MacDonald does provide some wonderful satirical moments: a pretentious poetess at a fundraiser insists she alone has witnessed “authentic” poverty, and Martine is constantly aware of privileged folks’ tendency toward a “gay sneering review of pain that wasn’t [theirs].” Unfortunately, Alms suffers from a scattered sense of identity and never develops this theme.

Martine thinks she’s found a useful role in the world when she finally moves out of her mother’s house and lands a job and an apartment, thanks to Father Kearney, an eccentric Catholic priest. It is clear from the outset that the good Father is a scammer, so the revelations of the denouement – he’s not a priest; he’s not that nice – don’t come as much of a surprise to the reader.

If MacDonald is trying to tell us that things are not always as they seem, and that notions of goodness are shifty and unreliable, she has succeeded. It is Martine, however, at home neither in the world of the do-gooder nor the well-to-do, who never seems to learn the lesson. Still, she soldiers on, seldom demonstrating any powers of circumspection, which makes things difficult for the reader, who gets saddled with her disillusionment and self-defeat. Alms seems to want to be a coming-of-age novel. Sadly, not only Martine, but the story itself, never quite grows up.