Sometimes when I can’t find a book in a local bookstore I shop through Amazon. (Mea culpa, independent booksellers.) This means that Amazon has a virtual portrait of me as a reader that they use to send me little notices based on what they think I will like. They are almost never right. What the sophisticated business of automatic reader profiling doesn’t get is that many people read not for genre or subject or interests but for the taste of the words themselves.

Blue Mountain Trouble, the debut novel by Jamaican-born Toronto writer Martin Mordecai, is a case in point. Action adventure with touches of magic realism? Not in my profile. A Caribbean setting? No particular interest. Ghost story? Not so much. And yet, I was putty in Mordecai’s hands throughout.

The story begins with a bang. A pair of twins, walking down a mountain to their village school, encounter in the morning mist a vision of a huge, disembodied goat’s head. The vision fades, and seconds later the ground in front of them trembles and slides away. Was the goat a malevolent presence, or did it save them from injury or worse? Already, the book is a grabber – not so much because of the dramatic action or the mystery, but because of the leisurely, rhythmic, hospitable storytelling voice:

They looked down the path they were walking, and where a moment ago there was Stedman’s Corner and Marcus Garvey Primary, then Cross Point, then Cuthbert Bank and Content Gap, in steps that a drunk giant might take to the hazyblue sea far below – now all of a sudden there was only cloud, thick as Mama’s soup, slicking the grass and stones with moisture and making the path where they walked all their life mysterious and new, and sometimes dangerous.
   
A few pages later, the twins are lying in their beds, in a room divided by a curtain, discussing their weird, exciting day. In a classic sibling exchange, they are also vying for superiority in a rally of retorts and well-worn insults. Practical Jackson doesn’t stand a chance beside his clever sister Pollyread, as she beats him into verbal submission. “There was a long sigh from the other side of the curtain, which Pollyread’s little grin swallowed like a sponge.”

In this wise, funny, and surprising story Mordecai weaves together three plots. One involves a parting of the ways between the twins, as bookish Pollyread wins a rare scholarship to continue her education in town. A second features trouble-making Jammy, the village bad boy, newly returned from prison. In the third strand we become gradually aware, as do the twins, of Mama’s pregnancy, and the dangers that presents.

The familiar tropes of middle-grade fiction – sibling rivalry and loyalty, family secrets, stage fright, the librarian as hero, the disobedient pet – are played out against the crisply sketched setting of rural Jamaica. A large cast of minor characters provides a lively background mosaic. Miss Gloria, who handles a hoe and cutlass with equal ease. Solitary, courteous, natty Mr. Cowan. Aidrene, champion elocutionist. Keneisha’s new baby, the size of a loaf of brown bread. Everyone comes with a story. Devout Christianity, respect for education, and duty toward the elderly are stirred into a mixture that includes rueful, laissez-faire attitudes to soft drugs and sex. (“Miss Mildred’s four children, they knew, didn’t all have the same father, but that wasn’t remarkable.”) The story that winds through this community can seem meandering, like the mountain path, but two well-choreographed surprises pull the whole thing together.

Most delicious of all in this plum pudding of a book is the language. For some young Canadian readers the diction and cadence of this story will be as comfortable and familiar as an old boot. For the rest of us, Mordecai, without resorting to explanations or a glossary, teaches us how to hear and understand. In the same way the children in Top Valley get their information as “potato peelings from adult conversations,” so we figure out this world. By the time Jackson wonders if the family secret causing so much tension could be that Jammy is Papa’s “outside pickney,” we know exactly what might have gone on in the past. We might well reach the end of the book, a lovely quiet conversational coda about the souls of the dead and the unborn, without ever exactly knowing what a “duppy” or an “obeah” is, but Mordecai pays us the compliment of respecting that readers have more than one way of understanding a word and a concept. When human relationships are honest and precisely observed, as they are in this novel, everything else falls into place as newly familiar.

This is fiction’s best trick – changing your reading tastes with each book, and keeping that snoopy profiling software firmly in its place.