Twelve-year-old Jolene is a straight-A student who flies under the radar most of the time, afraid to take chances. Her twin brother, on the other hand, takes calculated risks in life and reaps the rewards, most recently a Vancouver swim camp trip. It’s a reward Jolene feels could have been hers, had she only been a boy. She contends, “People expect boys to be risk-takers, to do courageous things and take chances. They don’t expect girls to do those things, so we don’t.”

Jolene resigns herself to what she believes will be a tedious summer, trailing behind her curator father as he gathers research material and photographs for his Museum of Disasters, while her twin enjoys the West Coast. When her grandfather reveals his secret of time-travel, he takes her back to the town of Frank, Alberta, just days before the infamous slide. There, she masquerades as a boy to test her gender-risk theory and eventually learns to be strong, in her own clothes.

Visitors to Frank, a town buried in 1903 under the weight of 90 million tons of mountain rock, are naturally awed by the slide’s devastating impact on the landscape. Calgary author Cathy Beveridge sensitively conveys the human loss resulting from the slide, where 70 of the town’s 600 residents died. Like Mary Harelkin Bishop’s Tunnels of Time, a time-travel tale set in Moose Jaw’s underground network of tunnels, this story is also jam-packed with facts and local folklore, including the spooky legend of the Lost Lemon Mine. For those readers unfamiliar with the details of the Frank tragedy, the author provides all the necessary background material. But what sets Beveridge’s story apart from other time-travel tales is its emotional content. The author momentarily lifts the Frank slide up from under the grim weight of dusty statistical figures, and gives voice and body to its victims and survivors in a compelling tale that’s not only historically accurate but relevant to young adults.