Maggie and her sister, Jenny, are still mourning their father’s death when their mom drops them off in Williams Lake, B.C., at the home of a not-so-friendly friend of the family. She promises the girls she’ll come back for them, though she doesn’t know exactly when. Months and then years go by, but she never returns.

In her first novel, Frances Greenslade follows Maggie and Jenny as they come of age in a strange town without either of their parents. Greenslade mixes loss with fear, hope, and, like so many Canadian authors before her, the emotional pull of Canada’s rugged, formidable backcountry.

After the letters and money from their mother stop coming, Maggie convinces Jenny that they shouldn’t try to find her. But as the girls grow older, Jenny has to confront a difficult situation, for which she very much needs her mother. And so Maggie sets off, like a woodsy Sherlock Holmes, to track down their missing parent. What she finds are secrets buried in her family’s history.

Greenslade’s prose is at times a bit hokey, offering repeated descriptions of the forest: “A chickadee sang fee-bee below the raucous cry of a raven. A waxwing chirruped high and thin and a woodpecker hammered a nearby tree. Early morning, fresh and cool, and the bush was a jungle of sounds. The sunlight held just the soft breath of the heat it would bring later.” But while a family saga set in the Canadian wilderness might sound tired, Shelter is not dull. Greenslade infuses her novel with enough intrigue to keep readers turning pages.