Young Emmaline Roke’s pastoral childhood in 19th-century England ended abruptly when her father – who used to call her the “Moon King’s daughter” because of the sentimental childhood stories she loved – died of cholera. Emmaline, her young brother Tommy, and their mother were forced to move to the cluttered stench of an industrial town, where the mother got work in a cotton mill and Emmaline became a seamstress.

But five years later, Emmaline, now 16, finds herself facing an even more horrendous future. Her mother, badly injured in a factory accident and desperate for the laudanum that numbs her pain, sells Tommy to a master chimneysweep from London. Emmaline courageously decides to go to find her brother, guided only by the chimneysweep’s scribbled note. Securing work as a laundry maid in London – a city that overwhelms both her and the reader with its monstrous gap between rich and poor – Emmaline searches for and is ultimately reunited with her brother.

Linda Holeman’s Search of the Moon King’s Daughter is a powerful recreation of life in 1830s England. This is new fictional terrain for the Manitoba writer whose previous young adult novels, Promise Song, Mercy’s Birds, and Raspberry House Blues, have all been set in her home province. Holeman packs a great deal of fascinating material into her moving portrait of the period. Her realistic rather than romanticized portrayal – especially of the treatment of young chimney sweeps – is one of the novel’s greatest strengths.

But this book isn’t just an exploration of 19th-century England; it’s also the story of an extraordinary young woman and her ability to take responsibility for her family when the adults in her life, particularly her mother, have failed her. Emmaline is an engaging character, one the reader comes to truly care for as the novel unfolds. On another level, hers is the story of a young woman’s search for her lost childhood.