“Quirky” is one of those overused words, right up there with “dot-com” and “extreme.” But Lee Gowan’s first novel, Make Believe Love, really does deserve the epithet. You’ve got Joan, the wiseass, sexy librarian; Jason, the slimy reporter; and Goodwin, the reclusive farmer obsessed with a movie star. Put them together in a small Saskatchewan town bearing the outlandish name Broken Head, throw in an off-kilter parent or two, and you’ve got quirks flourishing in every chapter.

The lives of the three main characters intersect when Jason decides to use Joan to get an interview with Broken Head’s most famous resident, Darwin Andrew Goodwin. Goodwin’s essentially a stalker, convinced that Canadian-born starlet Stephanie Rush is in love with him. He’s tried scaling the walls of her Malibu mansion, calls her agency 176 times in one week, and believes he’s receiving messages from her in the trees on his remote farm. In the right light and the right blonde wig, Joan resembles Stephanie enough to attempt to win Goodwin’s confidence – with unexpected results.

Toronto-based, but a native son of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Gowan makes some marvelous observations about small- and large-town life. Consider, for instance, Joan’s reflections on Broken Head’s lone “artsy” person: “There’s probably every kind of person in Broken Head that there is in any city, except that there’s only one or two of him or her, so that instead of belonging to some artificial community, she or he has no choice but to participate in a real one.” It’s this kind of wry, insider wit that saves Make Believe Love from the weird-for-the-sake-of-weird quicksand so many “quirky” works fall into.

In the end, the reader is never completely sure what to believe, as the narrative presents both Goodwin’s version of events, filtered through Joan’s eyes, and snippets of the tabloidesque book Jason is writing. This tension between what is and what seems to be – unrequited love or scary obsession, fame or notoriety, truth or history – is at the core of this strong first novel.