Breathless plotting rules Joan Clark’s new novel, Latitudes of Melt. A fisherman finds a baby girl floating on an ice pan in the North Atlantic, and takes her home to raise with his family in the small fishing village of Drook, on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. We know Aurora is strange – a changeling, perhaps – by her white hair and eyes of two different colours. Also, as she grows up she reads easily and loves poetry and nature, traits that seem unusual to the Drook community. Aurora marries a lighthouse keeper who shares her love of literature. They have two children, one of whom becomes a teacher, the other an engineer who specializes in ice. Eventually, we learn of Aurora’s origins, which have to do with the sinking of the Titanic.

The term “latitudes of melt” refers to the area in the North Atlantic where southward-moving icebergs begin to melt. While the ice imagery occasions the freshest writing in the novel, Clark moves so quickly through her story that little of this fascinating subject sticks. Likewise for her rambles through the history, folklore, and geology of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula; I wished for a more immediate, interior sense of what these mean to Clark’s characters.

Much of Latitudes of Melt is told in the third person, and ranges among several characters from the island and from abroad. Interwoven among these chunks are brief sections in Aurora’s voice. Unfortunately, the shifts in point of view suffer from Clark’s skipping along the surface of her character’s experiences; instead of a textured weaving, the result is a lack of focus and depth. Aurora’s voice, flat and psychologically uninflected, reveals no special insights and remains unengaging. The vitality that energizes this novel lies in the chock-a-block telling of the tale.