“Educational time travel” describes this story of a girl’s summer sojourn in Charlottetown, P.E.I. When her parents decide to renovate their Toronto house, Darby is sent to hang out with unfamiliar grandparents. There she has to peel spuds, pick raspberries, and wash dishes without a dishwasher, so it’s little wonder that she strikes up an acquaintance with the mysterious Gabe, a neighbourhood boy.

Gabe leads Darby through a stone window frame into various places and periods in the past. She witnesses the Inuit crossing the Bering Strait, spends a while on a “coffin ship” of ailing Irish immigrants, and sees her Scottish great-grandfather import a new-model printing press to P.E.I. Amidst these adventures, she warms up to her grandparents and comes to mourn her grandfather’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s. The novel also throws an infant death, a new baby, and Darby’s grandfather’s sudden passing into the mix.

Dyer conveys the lesson that Canada is a country full of people with mixed pasts and heritages, and that one’s “parental units” and grandparents are people who have their own stories. But in keeping her narrative voice close to Darby’s perspective, she limits herself to banal language, a graceless rendition of contemporary “teen talk.” Darby’s exclamations of “sheesh” and “for Pete’s sake” make awkward bedfellows with the attitudinal “as if,” another favoured expression.

More pervasively, mundane language  and clichés (“eyes drawn like magnets”; “spread like wildfire,” etc.) often prevent what should be grand, exciting events from becoming vivid or compelling. Darby’s guide, Gabe, is rather overly generous with information, turning Darby’s time-travelling adventures into something more akin to history lectures, rather than developing them as lived experiences or occasions for deepening character and relationships.