Displaced by a hip stepmother who has a new baby on the way, 13-year-old Kaitlin Carr feels like she doesn’t fit into her family anymore. She’s bitterly disappointed that she’s being sent off to Halifax to visit her grandparents. But there she discovers that her great-grandfather was one of the British Home Children, sent to Canada in the early 1900s with the promise of a new life but treated instead as little more than indentured servants. She also encounters the ghostly presence of a young girl who leads her to even more intriguing revelations about her own family history and ultimately forces her to rethink what it truly means to have a loving and supportive family.

Irene Watts movingly explores the issue of family identity in her latest novel, Flower, with the same poignant sensitivity she brought to her series of novels about the Kindertransport. Here she dexterously moves between Kaitlin’s story and that of the ghostly Lillie, portraying a contemporary teen’s confusion and isolation, juxtaposed with the brutal lives that often faced Home Children in Canada. She manages to convincingly tie all the myriad narrative threads together, so that readers see family relationships from the perspectives of Kaitlin and Lillie, as well as those of Kaitlin’s father, her grand-parents, and great-grandparents.

Kaitlin’s reconciliation with her father and stepmother is just a little too smooth, given their conflict at the book’s beginning, but this is a relatively minor issue. Watts’ novel is a welcome addition to the existing body of work about the lives of Home Children by Linda Holeman, Barbara Haworth-Attard, and Jean Little.