Kristen den Hartog’s dark, tender first novel reveals her as a sort of literary younger sister to Alice Munro, plumbing the landscape of small town southern Ontario to turn up stories of sexual discontent and childhood secrets. As with many a Munro story, the deep sources of den Hartog’s work lie in change and choice – and the lack of, fear of, and desire for either of these in many a small town life. Den Hartog, who works as a florist in Toronto, also has a Munroesque knack for dropping shocks into a plot as casually as pebbles from a dock.

Water Wings opens with sisters Hannah and Vivian Oelpke driving back from Ottawa and Toronto, respectively, to the town where they grew up and where their shiftless, narcissistic mother is to be wed for a second time. In the course of their homecoming, Vivian, the elder by five years, becomes all edges – sharp tongue, sharp memory, prickly mien. In contrast, Hannah is left full of unanswered questions, secrets she can’t share, and memories which, upon airing, are revealed to be more invention than truth – as when Vivian debunks Hannah’s recollection of rescuing and freeing a bat trapped behind a bureau. Their mother backs Vivian’s version: the elder sister rescued the women of the family from the bat and killed it outside on a rock.

As girls, the sisters are surrounded by creatures of air and water, and den Hartog dexterously uses the perfection and vulnerability of nature to mirror the children’s hidden worlds. The insects that so repulse their gorgeous mother, for example, are objects of intense sympathy for gawky cousin Wren, whose webbed, deformed hands signal anomaly in a female line that values beauty and regularity above all. The enduring sense of den Hartog’s story, whose plot works like a shell game, is that mysteries revealed are definitely not mysteries solved.