In the acknowledgements to this wild ride of a novel, Ottawa writer and journalist Jamieson Findlay refers to his story as a “mishmash.” It is an apt description of a book that contains aspects of a conventional middle-grade character-driven novel, a collection of short stories in the speculative/fantasy/folklore mode, a transcription of an evening of oral storytelling, and an interactive narrative that, were it online, would be lousy with clickable links.

The scaffolding of the story involves a journey. Eleven-year-old Emmeline and her grandmother set up a travelling bookstore in an “old but ardent” vessel called Permanent Wants. In the company of a cat and two crickets, they take a trip down the Rideau Canal Waterway, encountering a host of vibrant and eccentric characters.

They find adventure in each of eight ports of call. One involves a con man and an imaginary Middle Eastern kingdom. Another features a crow that speaks the mother tongue of the world. And then there’s the antiquarian book forger and the woman whose mission in life is to put doppelgängers in touch with each other. In the Bay of Small Blessings (some place names are real; most are fanciful), Emmeline and her grandmother deal with not one, but two escaped snakes. In Timberquinn they find themselves in a town cursed to have no music.

The titles of the chapters – “At War with the Caliph of Darkness,” “The Discovery of Zeya Shan,” and so on – suggest high fantasy, but the stories themselves are more like tall tales. In each location, Grandmother and Emmeline are catalysts for good, whether through derring-do, amateur detective skills, or just plain kindness.

There are many reasons why this novel should not work. First of all, it is digressive, meandering, and loosely structured. Gran makes halibut and zucchini kebabs for dinner, so how about we pause and get that recipe? That Middle Eastern kingdom is mentioned in various obscure travel guides and a 1920 falconry manual titled Taming the Haggard. Don’t know what a haggard is? No need to google it: Findlay halts the story to tell us.

Secondly, the extensive cast is mostly adult, and much of the humour skews boomer: “Gran says of a particularly untalented singer, ‘Now I know why they call him Bob Dylan without the vocal range.’” Furthermore, elaborately named characters like Iseult Consolata LeGrand and Teolani McHovec live on a different plane of fictional reality than the naturalistic and delicately drawn Emmeline.

Finally, Findlay sets himself an additional challenge by telling the story from a loopy point of view. There is a first-person narrator, but his identity is not revealed until the epilogue. He’s not actually present during the journey, and thus could not know what really happened – his information comes from Emmeline.

Emmeline, however, does not speak, as she is recovering from coma-induced aphasia. She cannot write, and knows a limited amount of sign language. We know what she’s thinking and feeling, which suggests the presence of an omniscient narrator. We also, on occasion, drop into the minds of other minor characters. Try to make logical sense of this and your brain will hurt.

In a daft and likeable way, the book does work. As with oral storytelling or opera, the material is almost secondary to the voice, and the narrative voice here is warm, funny, and ingratiating. Findlay uses language like a conjurer: just when his prose edges toward the self-indulgent, he pulls a string of coloured scarves out of his fist and charms us. He’s especially good with the rhythmical three-phrase build: “Picardy Bob used to say that in all the years he had known Josephina Fitch, her hair had never lacked drama. For a while it was in pigtails; then it was in dreadlocks; now it was just high and wild and natural, like an osprey’s nest.”

The tangled web of digressive material also feels as though it comes from genuine enthusiasm, wide reading, and lively curiosity. One is reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s contention that the world is so full of a number of things. (Stevenson, by the way, is alluded to in the author’s note, in the phrase “a different parish of the infinite.” What’s this got to do with anything? Come on, lighten up and enjoy the digression.) Lost languages, how to fashion a cheap anchor, odd book titles, the folklore of doppelgängers, the rare Gomera lizard – half a day spent in this book’s company leaves one eager to bop around the Internet, trying to sort out the true from the invented.

The novel also succeeds through frequent poignancy. At every quiet moment, the story reins in the reader as it gets inside Emmeline’s consciousness. We witness her struggle to find words, to connect with the people she meets, to retrieve the person she was before her illness. Because of her silence, Emmeline is the heart of this jolly mishmash, providing focus when things get too hectic.