Despite her curiously old-fashioned name, Toronto-born, U.K.-based author Trilby Kent is actually quite young. What’s more, although you would never know it from the writing, Medina Hill is her first novel. It’s a good beginning, and holds out hope for great work in the future.

The story begins in 1935 London, England. Eleven-year-old Dominic has pretty much stopped speaking to anyone outside of his immediate family. His silence is clearly stress-related: Dominic’s father is unemployed, his mother is coughing up blood, and he and his younger sister Marlo are victimized at school.

Life changes when Uncle Roo offers to take both children to stay with him and Auntie Sylv in Cornwall. Roo (for Rupert) was a conscientious objector in the First World War, and therefore knows what it means to be an outsider. Now, he and Sylv have created an artists’ colony, a haven for misfits  populated by an eccentric trio – a musician, novelist, and a spirit medium-cum-visual artist. Dominic and Marlo fit right in.

Both children also find solace in books. For Marlo, it’s one of her mother’s cookbooks, which seems to promise comfort and a better life. Dominic, by contrast, pores over a biography of T.E. Lawrence, an outsider who accomplished something great. Dominic discovers a (somewhat unlikely) connection between Lawrence and one of the artists, and even finds a way to put the lessons he has learned from Lawrence into practice when he gets involved with a group of Roma who are camped nearby.

The plot of Medina Hill is sometimes hard to follow, and the climax a little contrived. Moreover, many young readers will find the cultural and historical details a bit bewildering. But no matter, because the voice of the narrator and the motley cast of characters are brilliantly realized. Kent’s language is both poetic (“grim wharves like teeth gnawing the river”) and insightful (eight-year-old Marlo is “stuck between the safety of being babied, and the humiliation of not growing up fast enough”), and these strengths more than compensate for any shortcomings. Definitely a writer to watch.