This powerfully strange first novel by Toronto-based Elizabeth de Freitas traces the aqueous odyssey of a Nova Scotian teenager who abandons her maritime birthplace to defy fate in relatively landlocked Toronto. Full of mythic incident and narrated with dreamlike logic, Keel Kissing Bottom is a tale obsessed with portents, calamities, and predestination.

The novel opens with Mary Seeburth at age 12, aboard the family boat. Terrified as her half-mad mother rants the “truth” about the 1917 Halifax harbour explosion, Mary is told that the famous split anchor on the city’s monument was recovered from their ancestral home, propelled there by the blast. In this version, the shank is not the detritus of an accident, but fate’s deliberate branding of the unfortunate family.

As their boat drifts dangerously into a foggy calm, the panicked child is required to navigate for her mother. They manage to escape hazard, with no thanks to Mary’s wild directions. This crisis forges Mary’s identity: her sensitivity to omens, her terror of disorientation, and her perilous fascination for running aground.

In such a densely metaphorical novel, de Freitas succeeds by imbedding her intricate motifs in the concrete action of Mary’s journey. The prose is fresh and imagistic, spinning dozens of meditations on everything from the metaphysics of earthworm dissection to eroticism and the stock exchange. The novel’s wry humour also goes a long way toward tempering Mary’s mood of introverted melancholia but it occasionally jars in its cleverness.

The title puns not only on nautical and psychological conditions, but on Mary’s burdensome posterior. This broad-ranging cluster of associations demonstrates the author’s love of tonal shifts – in this case, from the earnest to the ironic. This creates an awkward rhythm at times, and works to distance the reader from the high stakes of Mary’s journey. Confusion also reigns in the elliptical final chapters, which resolve the story with a final leap into symbolism that may leave readers intellectually piqued but emotionally unsatisfied. Nonetheless, Keel Kissing Bottom emerges, undeniably, as the work of a fierce and startling imagination.