The title of this novel isn’t strictly accurate: there are two goat ladies, not one, and they’re no ladies. Mag and Florrie, a pair of sisters well beyond child-bearing age, have lived for many years in a ramshackle house on Anchor Bay, B.C., an hour by boat from Sechelt. The sisters are children of Norwegian immigrants, fiercely independent, steering clear of the authorities out of bad past experience. Florrie, a living inventory of the major causes of heart disease, can’t do much besides cook and sit by the fire. Mag raises the goats, picks salal and mushrooms, and salvages timber. She must compete for this subsistence with other denizens of the coast, like Billy Thom, the damaged product of the Sechelt Residential Schools, and the unscrupulous Saari family.

The sisters’ closest neighbour is a hippie girl living alone across the inlet. When they see no signs of life from the girl’s floathouse for several wintry days, they reluctantly investigate and find the girl and a baby half-frozen and barely alive. Mag takes the girl to hospital in Sechelt while Flossie looks after the baby until they can turn her over to “the Welfare.” Somehow, that never happens.

From this gripping start, Leslie spins her tale out over more than 20 years of life on the salty margins of B.C. Predictably, in the tradition of Anne of Green Gables and Girl of the Limberlost, the infant has a transformative effect on the lives of these crusty, disaffected adults. Though Leslie is no literary stylist, her story is carefully crafted. A historian and environmentalist, she is the co-author of Stain upon the Sea, an account of West Coast salmon fishing that won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize for 2005. Her familiarity with the territory gives her novel great credibility.

The Goat Lady’s Daughter is not high art, but it’s a good yarn – honest, funny, likeable, and highly readable.