The discovery of some kind of artifact – preferably locked in a ribbed trunk in a dusty cellar or attic – is a classic catalyst in children’s literature, particularly in time travel stories. In Frances, W.D. Valgardson’s first novel for children after a number of acclaimed picture books and short story collections, a 12-year-old heroine discovers the diary of her great-great grandmother, who immigrated to Manitoba from Iceland in the late 1800s. Though there is no physical time travel in Valgardson’s novel, its preoccupation is very much the past and secrets embedded in family history.

Written in Icelandic, the diary is a pleasing enigma to Frances, who is spending her summer holiday at her family cottage on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. Despite her mother’s rather perplexing disapproval, and her grandmother’s inability to remember much Icelandic, Frances is determined to unlock the diary’s story. She takes it to the local old folks’ home, and convinces the taciturn, wheelchair-bound Mr. Johannson, the resident librarian, to translate it for her in exchange for visits to the ice cream parlour. Closer to the present is another mystery in Frances’s life: the disappearance of her own father, shortly before she was born. Did he drown in a canoeing accident on the lake, his body never recovered, or did he desert his young family? Frances is increasingly frustrated by her mother’s and grandmother’s unwillingness to talk about it.

The past quickly becomes even more intrusive: Frances starts sensing ghostly presences trying to communicate with her and realizes when she looks at the diary that certain words translate themselves spontaneously in her mind. When two ravens begin putting in appearances (one black, one white, just like Huginn and Muninn, the mythological messengers of the Nordic god Odin), I was a little worried the story was going to veer off into supernatural looniness. But Valgardson keeps a tight lid on things, merely hinting at the otherworldly, sometimes to surprisingly creepy effect: “She got herself some fruit and cheese and a glass of orange juice. Just as she came into the living room, Samantha arched her back and her fur stood up. Frances just about tripped and dropped her plate. For a nanosecond, she thought there was someone sitting on the couch. She hadn’t been looking at the couch. It was off to one side, just at the edge of her vision.”

Somehow, though, there is something just a little tepid about the story, particularly in the first half. Partly this is because Valgardson relies a bit too heavily on exposition to tell his tale (the start of the first chapter, especially, feels bogged down with information). More critically, I think the book is imbued with a decidedly adult nostalgia (for the past, for the landscape), which clashes with a child’s true sensibility. It is rare for a 12-year-old to wax elegiac about flora and fauna. Valgardson does take care to draw Frances as unusual. She emerges slowly as a character with a quiet strength and verve that becomes increasingly appealing. But despite her love of big words, her exceptional maturity, and wry humour, she too often crosses the line between precocious child and authorial mouthpiece.

Here she is musing on the news of an impending property development: “She’d seen it happen to other beaches. The cottages were torn down. Big houses were jammed onto the lots. People brought in sod and created yards. The native trees were bulldozed and replaced with a few ornamentals. Why, she wondered, did people come to live in places like the island if they were going to turn it into another suburban development?” Pretty adult thinking for a 12-year- old. Partially this can be explained by Frances’s upbringing: “That was the problem with being an only child, her gran had said on more than one occasion. You ended up learning how to do adult things long before you should.” But how many 12-year-olds on their summer holiday would really get obsessed with translating the Icelandic diary of their great-great grandmother? An interest in the past, especially for its own sake, usually develops with age.

Valgardson’s dialogue is excellent, blunt, and realistically oblique, as are his relationships between characters. Frances’s rapport with her grandmother is refreshingly brisk, yet playful and affectionate, and there’s nothing remotely sentimental about her interaction and growing friendship with Mr. Johannson, which comprise some of the most moving scenes in the novel.

Frances’s mother is the only character who comes across as slightly hackneyed, like a bad TV parent. An ambitious real-estate agent who is frequently out, she insists her daughter call her Emily, not Mom: “I don’t want to be defined by the fact that I gave birth,” she often tells her daughter. “I am a person, not a thing.” This is just a touch heavy-handed for Valgardson, who usually excels in defining character with his understated style.

Frances’s investigations into her past are also twinned with movement toward the future, a coming of age. Over the summer, she learns about her armoured mother’s frailties and fallibility, unknowingly courts a boy she likes, and overcomes her fear and disrespect of the elderly. What Frances finally learns about her great-greats (as she calls them) is interesting though hardly earth-shattering. The real emotional climax comes when she is finally told the truth about her father, and this Valgardson handles with admirable restraint – no rising symphonic soundtrack, just a refreshingly truthful matter-of-factness. Nonetheless there’s still a sense of distance between the reader and Frances’s experiences, perhaps because Valgardson sometimes seems to be remembering a childhood instead of living one on the page.