The Diamondback Dog is the second foray into young adult fiction for George Bowering, a two-time Governor General’s Award-winning poet, and critic, historian, and baseball fan. In it, the eccentric foursome from his first YA book, Parents from Space, face the daunting task of returning a telepathic, time-travelling dog to the future.

This is not a standard time-travel fantasy. The heroine of the story, Coriander Corbishly, enjoys the poetry of bp Nichol, listens to the CBC – although she doesn’t understand what’s being said – and eats ginger and sweet potato pizza and dandelion salad. Her friends are equally weird, as is the truly strange Professor Purzelbaum, whose help they enlist. The minor players are no more than cartoonish exaggerations of a single, often funny, characteristic.

The storyline involves very little action. Corbishly travels back in time to when Captain George Vancouver first makes landfall on the West Coast, and forward to the world of the diamondback dog, where she meets the incredibly handsome descendant of her friend Harry. However, most of the book is spent in verbal games and what Corbishly calls nonsense and tomfoolery. It is slick, clever, and some of it is very funny. There are numerous in-jokes, such as a reference to Tim Wynne-Jones’s ears, and plays on words, both subtle and obvious. There is also a rather odd, deliberate, complete lack of apostrophes.

Not a book for everyone, this is aimed at older young adults with literary leanings. Teenage and adult fans of George Bowering and Parents from Space will enjoy its verbal acrobatics, but those expecting a fantasy adventure will be wondering halfway through if anything is ever going to happen, and will be disappointed and surprised, not least by the long digressions into literature and the quotes from a host of poets from Milton to Rainer Maria Rilke.