Teenage Torontonian Maeve O’Connor is plain and unpopular. Her parents seem destined for divorce and have shunted her off to her father’s relatives in the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland. Her only solace is the book her grandmother wrote about the adventures of a girl who slips through a portal to King Arthur’s Avalon. Maeve soon finds herself transported to this very same world.

Alison Baird (whose first book The Dragon’s Egg was nominated for a Silver Birch Award) quickly engages our sympathy for the solemn, prescient protagonist of her second novel. She is the first author I’ve read who realistically conveys the trauma someone would feel on being shanghaied to a parallel universe. Maeve copes by assuring herself that she is jet-lagged and merely dreaming about the world in her grandmother’s book. She becomes quite testy when the plot keeps diverging from the one she knows.

And what a plot! Baird creates an exciting quest rich with strange landscapes (like the forgotten undersea palace of the merrows and selkies) and mythical beasts, among them a sea monster of gigantic proportions. Reading the book is like taking a crash course in Celtic folklore. Unfortunately, Baird is so in love with her subject that she inundates her readers with unnecessary mini-lectures that are presented in indigestible chunks. Baird’s dialogue sometimes strikes a false note. Her fairy characters occasionally slip into the stilted fantasy-speak so familiar to the genre, while her mortal characters like Tom, who comes from the Middle Ages, often sound too contemporary. Maeve’s father’s determination to leave Toronto for St. John’s in search of work also stretches credulity. However, Baird’s portrait of Newfoundland is absolutely authentic, and Maeve’s character development ultimately satisfying.