Writing in the voice of a character living 150 years ago, a contemporary author has tricky choices to make about language and idiom, and about attitudes to social issues on which public opinion has changed a lot. Writing as Tess Macqueen, a fiery 13-year-old who comes by ship from Scotland around Cape Horn to Vancouver Island in 1857, new B.C. writer Jocelyn Reekie meets the many challenges of historical fiction with varying degrees of success.

Tess herself is an attractive character with whom modern readers can readily identify; her sense of justice is outraged by the class prejudice and racist attitudes she encounters aboard ship and in the colonial community around Victoria. An independent and spirited girl, she shoots a deer on the opening page of the book and later kills a raccoon with a stone and her knife, and (foolishly) jumps off the ship during the Atlantic crossing to have a swim. Reekie is best at describing such physical activities – how it feels to paddle a canoe, or to wash one’s verminous hair in a warm kettle of the ship’s scarce water. But the author’s haphazard use of the occasional Scottish dialect word doesn’t strengthen the narrative voice, and although Tess herself is a real enough character, those around her remain undeveloped.

From the number of people and possible subplots introduced, Tess could become a juicy three-volume Victorian novel, but many threads are left untied, leaving the reader puzzled and unsatisfied. Perhaps a sequel is hinted at, to pick up some of these dangling threads, such as the mysterious will that Tess finds but can’t finish reading. If so, such a sequel would do well to digest its research more fully, focus on fewer characters, and bring them more fully to life.