Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories recounts English journalist Alexandra Pratt’s tramp through the land God gave Cain, the still wild Labrador interior.

The book begins promisingly. Pratt decided to attempt the 600-mile canoe journey from the Atlantic coast through the interior to Ungava Bay after reading a National Geographic article about Mina Hubbard, an Edwardian explorer who became the first European to complete the route in 1905. The early explorer’s achievement was remarkable – she had to race a male explorer to become the first – but the journey only comes alive when Pratt quotes her predecessor’s diaries. Pratt deadens the earlier story by reducing almost every one of Hubbard’s triumphs to a victory against the restrictive gender norms of the period.

In recounting her own journey, Pratt attempts to manufacture drama with exclamatory writing – “The axe was gone!”; “The bear was eyeing us from across the river!”; “The forest fire might move in our direction!” In one typically overheated scene, Pratt lies in her tent, a bundle of nerves, imagining that a bear is ransacking the campsite. Instead, the minimal damage done to the site suggests the night-time visitor was one of those vicious Labradorean rabbits.

Labrador is a fascinating last frontier, the first part of North America sighted by the Europeans in the age of discovery, but the last to become truly known. But Pratt’s inattentive writing fails to paint a picture of the landscape through which she travelled, nor does it contain any serious introspection to compensate for the lack of well-drawn visuals.

Based on discussions with her Innu guide, Pratt spends extended periods of the book voicing unsophisticated arguments about the rights of Labrador’s indigenous peoples in the face of megaprojects like the Churchill Falls hydroelectric plant and the growing mineral claims staked in the region. She states the obvious – the native people have been forced or lured from the land that is the source of their identity – as if she were the first to discover these realities, and never takes the next step of proposing solutions.