Cape Breton and the windswept moors of England have more in common than you might imagine, besides rugged landscape and gorgeous vistas. Mitzi Dale’s new novel, about a young girl named Sarah working at a Cape Breton summer resort, includes a bunch of people with oddly familiar names, such as Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. But these aren’t descendants of Emily Brontë’s characters: they’re the originals, playing out their tortured dramas in modern incarnations.

Sarah doesn’t even seem to know about Wuthering Heights; she’s addicted to another art form altogether: soap opera. One high point of her “great and awful” first summer away from home is encountering her favourite soap star, Ellis Bell, in the flesh. It’s readers who have the fun of recognizing Brontë’s celebrated lovers reconfigured – that is, if they’ve read Wuthering Heights.

But familiarity with Brontë’s novel is not a prerequisite, and the book has other engaging elements, from Sarah’s difficulties with her co-workers at the resort to her occasional digressions on the best dental floss, the merits of wooden versus rubber swing seats, and the habits of the rich and famous. Though the story’s pace sometimes falters, Dale, a one-time Governor General’s Award nominee who now lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, holds her readers’ attention with plenty of plot. The mystery at her book’s heart is one of adult troubles seen through the eyes of young characters preoccupied with their own unfolding dramas. Sarah finds it hard to understand – and unseemly – that elderly folk of 30 or 40 could have any connection to passion and romance. Dale, however, makes a clear point of the tragic consequences those passions can have for the children who are their incidental result.