In Gayle Friesen’s second novel, Men of Stone, 15-year-old Ben Conrad is hardly thrilled when his great-aunt Frieda comes to stay for several weeks. Ambitiously, Friesen, whose acclaimed first novel, Janey’s Girl, won a host of awards, has chosen a teenaged boy as her narrator, and depicts him very convincingly, down to his observations on the perplexing differences between the sexes, and the trials of being the only male in a female household. “The upper floor was the land of the Amazon women, and I hardly ever visited. I’d learned, soon after my tenth birthday, that this was where they walked around in their underwear. Wastepaper baskets were filled with wrappers and tissues that told me more than I wanted to know about the female body, and multicoloured strappy things hung in the bedroom. I remember using one of their bras as a slingshot once – with the underwire ones you can get a great distance – but nobody appreciated my ingenuity. Mostly I stayed away.”

In brief opening chapters, Friesen vividly introduces her large cast of characters, skilfully letting their personalities reveal themselves naturally in the drama of their scenes, rather than laboriously describing them. Through Ben’s first-person narration we meet his three older sisters – even-keeled Beth, the dramatic Mad, and the brooding, cynical Joni (aspiring cook, actress, and painter, respectively) – and his beleaguered mother who teaches part-time while completing her master’s thesis in business administration. Flanked by his two friends, the beefy extrovert Fish and the enigmatically troubled Stan, Ben has a life that initially seems pretty good. Though he refers to his own family as dysfunctional, and laments his mother’s inability to talk frankly about his father and his death, Ben is clearly well loved, and the household seems, at worst, pleasantly eccentric and chaotic.

At school, however, things are becoming progressively more difficult. Ben doesn’t make the volleyball team, he can’t find the courage to talk to the girl he likes, and he’s being hassled, with increasing violence, by an appropriately named dork called Claude, who covets the same girl. Friesen has a very good ear for dialogue, and she does an excellent job at the repartee of teenagers, as well as the self-conscious push-and-shove preening of adolescent boys intent on impressing girls. Throughout the novel, Ben’s narration is infused with a wry sense of humour. Coming home from school one afternoon, he sees that the ancient Aunt Frieda has done some baking: “White, pasty lumps of cooked dough smeared with varnish-like icing gleamed from the kitchen counter. They reminded me of the provisions nuclear-war survivors were reduced to in science-fiction movies. But I could see from the crumbs of Mom’s plate that she’d had one and was still breathing.”

It’s natural enough that the arrival of an unknown great-aunt should dismay a teenaged boy – but her arrival also causes a certain amount of dismay in the reader. When Aunt Frieda shows up, pretty much out of the blue on page one, we can almost hear the emotional and thematic baggage clunk down beside her, and we know that her presence is going to be highly meaningful and poignant, whether we like it or not. While she’s not quite a caricature – Frieda is pleasingly self-aware and has a good sense of humour – you can almost imagine her being played by Robin Williams, looking concerned and soulful, simply yearning to heal everybody. Aunt Frieda arrives at the Conrad household ostensibly to get to know the wife and children of her nephew (Ben’s late father), but she also has her own story to tell, and naturally it’s a doozy.

While Frieda was a young woman in poverty in post-revolution Russia, her husband was arrested by Stalin’s agents – whom she calls the Men of Stone – for alleged dissidence (a pacifist Mennonite, he refused to join the Communist Party) and imprisoned for many years. During this time, Frieda was also separated from her small son, who was brought up by another family, though ultimately they were reunited.

Stalinist persecution and school bullying may seem a rather odd and disproportionate juxtaposition, but Ben’s persecution is far from trivial: later in the book, he is beaten unconscious by Claude and his two goons. Thereafter, consumed with thoughts of violent revenge, Ben starts learning to box. The book’s climax involves his confrontation with Claude and his temptation to become a “man of stone” himself (an expression that is unfortunately used far too frequently throughout). While Ben’s voice is mostly very successful, Friesen tends to let him editorialize his experiences too much, making connections too early, and thus belabouring his ultimate emotional growth. Indeed Frieda’s very presence in the book feels too manicured, a thematic mirror into which not just Ben, but also his sisters and mother, can gaze and gain new insight.

The movement of this story is highly internal – a difficult feat – and Friesen mostly pulls it off, although the intense emotion sometimes accrues a patina of mawkishness: a little too often, characters’ voices drop to whispers; they say things “quietly” or “softly” with their eyes wet with tears, and sometimes suddenly leave the room at poignant moments. (This slight leaning toward sentimentality, sadly, is reflected in the book’s Hallmark-card cover: a photographic collage of a dewy-eyed teen heartthrob Ben, a noble Aunt Frieda, and a period shot of Russian fieldworkers.)

Friesen has created much to admire in her second novel: a vital, insightful narrator, a lively cast of secondary characters, and, equally impressive, a totally believable teen world. Ben’s self-consciousness, his awkwardness (both physical and verbal) around the girl he likes, his self-doubt, are all expertly captured by Friesen – as is his growing, subterranean rage after he’s beaten by Claude. The scenes in which Ben stokes his volcanic anger in the boxing ring, and gives his thoughts over to revenge, are particularly compelling, and lay the rails toward an inventive climax that is satisfying without being contrived.