The Siege of Leningrad by German forces during the Second World War lasted for 29 months and notched up a civilian death toll in the hundreds of thousands. With just one supply route open – an ice trail across frozen Lake Ladoga – slow starvation was the most common cause of death.

In Fox’s Nose, the first novel from British Columbia writer Sally Ireland, a found diary places the siege and its continuing reverberations at the centre of the story. The recollected first-person narrative begins with a description of how, in the attic of her aunt’s farmhouse at Christmas 1972, the then-14-year-old Julia Kabalevskaya discovers the diary in which her now-dead grandmother documented her family’s experiences during the siege.

Gripped by the contents of the diary, Julia begins to recognize how fundamentally the present is contextualized and informed by the past, both within and without her own increasingly fragmented family. Julia’s task – to end the cycle of damage that began with the siege and continues to spiral through the succeeding generations of her family – promises to be a formidable one. Among other entanglements, she and her German-Canadian best friend, Ursula, must relive the racial antagonism that led to the Second World War, in the hope of finding a way to move beyond the burdens of their respective histories

Ireland’s characterization of Julia is moving and real. While the difficulties associated with a 14-year-old narrator, even a precocious one, can be significant, these are for the most part addressed through the recollection-from-middle-age technique. Particularly compelling is the relationship between Julia and Ursula, troubled as it is by generations of racial mistrust, misinformation, and prejudice. The delicate nature of their ultimate quest – one girl must learn empathy while the other must learn to refuse what her young mind has construed as a legacy of victimhood – is handled here with finesse and appeal. Julia’s perception of herself as doubly “other,” as Slav and as woman, and her struggle to overcome a tendency toward the role of victim emerges as a primary theme.

A weakness here comes in the form of Julia’s mother, whose character comes across as so relentlessly self-absorbed as to, at times, defy believability. Happily, as an absentee parent, her somewhat two-dimensional presence in the narrative is infrequent. Fox’s Nose is, however, an admirable novel. It is uniquely Canadian in its examination of new-world/old-world issues, and one of altogether too few novels concerned with the female coming-of-age experience.