New Girl brims with unfulfilled story potential. Kaitlin’s family moves from tiny Heron Lake into her grandmother’s house in downtown Toronto midway through Kaitlin’s Grade 10 year. She has our immediate sympathy trying to navigate a huge urban school with only her small-town experience to guide her. Missing her old boyfriend and her trouble-prone best friend Suze, Kaitlin is initially overwhelmed by it all. Soon she is targeted for friendship by Erin, a mysterious and annoying homeless girl. Erin puts together a “new girl” group, which also includes Sarita, from a peripatetic Indian family, and Danielle, a gorgeous black girl from Quebec. When Kaitlin meets the charming 18-year-old Alexei, from some vaguely tragic Slavic country, the novel’s structure is complete.

Will Kaitlin skirt having her heart and reputation broken by the disarming Alexei? Will her old pal Suze manage to keep from self-destructing? Will Erin ever find a home and finally, will the new girls forge a lasting friendship? The answer to all these questions is a credibility-straining yes. Among the many things we are told, not shown, is Erin’s vicious mouth. Repeated mention is made of how she could “get really ugly, really fast,” but for the most part, Erin’s actual speech wouldn’t give a Quaker pause. In dialogue, the teens “loathe” things or use “blithering idiot” as an epithet and are chastized for it.

Other scenes also suggest another era. When the girls reserve a table in the cafeteria for themselves they are greeted with frankly unbelievable chants of “new girl, new girl, new girl.” The girls are also maddeningly passive. Even after Erin is beaten into a coma by someone she can later identify, they don’t demand justice, or even police action, and in the end, it is Kaitlin’s wise grandmother who comes up with a solution for Erin’s homelessness. Overall, New Girl reads like a cautionary tale with the author’s good intentions sabotaging a potentially absorbing story.