Isolated from civilization for five months at the sardonically named Envy River Tower, with little more than a small cabin, watch tower, and outhouse, lives Percy Turner, a young woman deep in the throes of a sexual identity crisis. In her seventh summer as a fire tower ranger, Percy now has an Internet connection for the first time. As the summer progresses, she begins and maintains an e-mail courtship with Gilmore, who sits in his own lonely fire tower hundreds of miles away. When not watching for smoke or flirting online with Gilmore, Percy assesses her on-again, off-again relationship with Marlea, her childhood sweetheart. For Percy the question isn’t so much, “Am I straight or am I gay?” as, “Why doesn’t Marlea love me the way I love her?”

The best part of Burning Ground is a section that flashes back to 1975, recalling Percy’s childhood in a trailer park in the small town of Oldrock, Alberta. Here the story moves at a rollicking clip, as the reader meets Percy’s family, witnesses the birth of her love for Marlea, and learns of family secrets in prose that is witty, engaging, and real.

The fire tower scenes – where Percy reminisces, writes long and intimate e-mail messages to a man she has never met, and wonders about her own sanity – do tend to drag in parts. And the ending, although filled with several surprises and even unexpected danger, misses its mark. The previously effective prose style – marked by long, lyrical sentences – now hampers what should be a page-turning, heart-pounding scene. If the pacing of Pearl Luke’s first novel is spotty, though, her characters are memorable and passionate.