Children’s writers are often asked when they are going to start writing for adults. This can be an irksome question, but I am sometimes guilty of its reverse: When I read an adult novel that plumbs the character’s imaginative inner life or that revels in the gothic, I sometimes wonder when the writer is going to start to write for and about children. In The Town That Floated Away, Sandra Birdsell, a respected writer of adult fiction, reveals that she has seen the light.

Based on a radio play, this light fantasy centres on the adventures of Virginia Potts, a little girl who is left behind when her town floats away. In this confection, Birdsell reveals her familiarity with the traditions of the genre. There is the extravagant natural disaster – in this case, a spring flood. There is the gentle naughtiness, a cluster of toilet jokes. There is pleasure in word play and the illogical logic of nonsense. Virginia, who lost not just her parents but her whole community, is not just an orphan but a morphan. Best of all there is the immensely child-appealing convention that all adults are goofs and that only the strong and sensible children can save the day. In Birdsell’s cast of incompetent adults, we meet Virginia’s P.P.P.s (Preposterously Protective Parents), Madame Galosh (the embodiment of capitalism run rampant), and Mr. Edgar (the tunnel-visioned man of science).

This is a romp and like all good romps, it gets a bit out of hand. The parallel plots of Virginia’s desire to win a school trip to the bright lights of big-city St. Boniface and the plot involving the rituals of the annual spring flood don’t quite mesh. Some elements that worked well as a radio play, such as Mr. Edgar’s cello playing, don’t really work on the page. But the book is so lively, inventive, and, above all, good-natured (with none of the underlying misanthropy of, say, Roald Dahl) that one is happy to float along at the whim of its winds and waters. Illustrations by Helen Flook, recently arrived from England, completely match this joyful buoyancy.