In 1936 Beryl Markham, the British pioneer aviator, attempted the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight from England to New York. Battling low cloud, tempestuous weather, and a frozen fuel line that twice nearly stalled her engine, she made it as far as Cape Breton, where she crash-landed in a peat bog. Anne Laurel Carter, in her new novel Last Chance Bay, uses this fabulous but little-known incident in Canadian history as a defining moment in the life of her young heroine, Meg Christie. As Carter tells it, the woozy aviatrix’s words of greeting (“I’m Mrs Markham. I’ve just flown from England”) are delivered not to the fishermen who came to her aid, but directly to seven-year-old Meg, who witnesses the crash, and from that moment, sets her sights on becoming a pilot.

Six years pass, and 13-year-old Meg’s passion has not abated: Amelia Earhart is her new hero, and she dreams of flying away from the drudgery of her small mining town, where the threat of cave-ins and death hangs in the air like coal dust. It’s 1943, and the war has been brought close to home by prowling U-boats, one of which sank the passenger ferry from Sydney to Newfoundland the previous year – another true incident that Carter embroiders into her fiction. Carter integrates her historical material gracefully, having learned from writing period fiction for Penguin’s Our Canadian Girl series. Meg’s dream and zeal may be unusual, but she’s otherwise very much a girl of her time: she’s obedient and dutiful, her life revolving around her parents, school, extended family, and close community – all deftly sketched.

Meg’s life is a busy one, and uppermost in her mind are flight and love. When she isn’t plotting ways to get flying lessons, her thoughts turn to her changing body and her feelings for her older cousin Caleb, who has recently left school to start work in the mines. Her first romantic stirrings are tinged with guilt, however, as she’s terrified of committing “incense” – a term she once heard in a sermon.

The novel’s loose episodic structure doesn’t lend itself to gripping reading, and two flashback chapters slow down any forward momentum. But Meg’s peppy first-person narration gives the novel cohesion, appealing frankness, and oral verve: “My mother rolled her eyes whenever she looked at the curled-up picture of Amelia, tucked into my mirror frame. Mom said she looked ass over teakettle, her hair an awful mess as if she’d just jumped out of an open cockpit. To me, she just looked awful skinny. I suspected she’d done without meals when she was saving her money for flying lessons. Every hero had to make sacrifices. I knew that.”

Sometimes Meg’s voice slackens to a diary’s retrospective tone, which saps energy from the storytelling. Very occasionally she uses anachronistic expressions such as “a typical no-brainer.”

However, Carter is an excellent scene builder. An early sequence – where Meg visits the Sydney airshow and misses her first chance at flight because of a thunderstorm – is redolent of every child’s fierce longings and agonizing disappointments. Later in the novel, Carter constructs a clever scene in which Meg repels a bullying classmate, Jason, who in a drunken prank has loosed a bull in a pasture of young cows. Meg daringly shepherds the cows to safety, then gives Jason a fierce dressing down, finally vomiting on him. The scene packs an honest, visceral punch.

One of the novel’s many plot strands culminates in the school public speaking contest, which Carter uses as a platform to dramatize some of her themes. One student rhapsodizes about the sanctity of marriage; Jason lambastes women’s liberation; and Meg talks about her passion for Amelia Earhart. Meg has high hopes of winning the contest, but it is Caleb who steals the show by talking about sacrifice – and ends his speech with his intention to sign up in the army. The beaches of Normandy have just been stormed, and the final, conclusive battles of the war are at hand.

Devastated and angry, Meg at first thinks Caleb has succumbed to jingoism. Only later does she realize the full extent of his sacrifice: his army pay will enable his tubercular (and far from lovable) mother to be treated properly in a sanatorium. With Caleb gone, and the war scuppering her plans to get airborne, Meg falls into a funk that is alleviated in the novel’s standout sequence: her first descent into the coal mine.

The miners have just been awarded their first ever week of paid vacation, and Meg wants to do something daring and unique. Passing herself off as her lookalike brother, she spends a thrilling day beneath the earth, where she sees things she’s never seen before, such as the pit ponies who spend their lives in the mines. Here beneath the earth Meg gains some perspective on her own ambitions and frustrations when she realizes how much these men sacrifice and risk every day to support their families. The whole scene provides the novel’s thematic pivot.

Carter ingeniously uses the pit ponies to raise an interesting question. The miners have decided it’s only fair the ponies should have a holiday too, and at the end of her shift, Meg helps bring them to the surface. The ponies are overjoyed, but at week’s end, they fight their return to the mines violently. Is it better to have a taste of freedom or none at all, if it’s only going to be thwarted?

Though Carter provides no pat answer, her ending strongly implies that to strive and hope, even in the grimmest circumstances, is an unquenchable and glorious human trait. Though Meg knows her future is unsure, in the novel’s final pages, a second plane makes a dramatic landing on her little strip of Cape Breton coastline. This time Meg gets the promise of lessons and her first flight.