Children who love to read are blessed by doubly adventurous lives. Not only do they experience their fiction with an intensity equal to or surpassing that of real life, but they tend to shape their real-life experiences into stories that assume (in retrospect) the shape and vividness of written narrative.

That said, it’s a brave author who decides to mould real family life, with all its anticlimaxes and prosaic stretches of non-event, into something with the shape and allure of a children’s story. Marie-Louise Gay is nothing if not bold: in Travels with My Family, she has not only leaped from her usual genre into a completely new one – a true-life travel memoir of family vacations – she has decided to co-author it with her husband, novelist and translator David Homel, and narrate it in the voice of her older son, an approach that, in unskilled hands, could risk cloying self-consciousness.

Luckily, no such fate befalls Travels with My Family. Gay is one of Canada’s most prolific and honoured picture book authors and illustrators, the winner of two Governor General’s Awards, and the beloved creator of the fiery and imaginative character of Stella, fairy of the forest and star of the sea. In Travels, her and Homel’s prose is conversational without being lax, lively without sliding into farce, and gently sardonic rather than the hard-edged, smart-aleck tone so familiar in contemporary middle-reader fiction told in the first person.

In nine chapters, the nameless narrator tells nine vacation adventures, all featuring himself and his much younger brother (we can guess these siblings are about 10 and five), their daydreamy artist mother, who always has a sketchbook in hand, and their determinedly anti-consumerist father.

Boy #1 (how I wish Gay had named her characters) longs for back-seat snacks like Fritos, hotels with swimming pools, and visits to Disneyland. Instead, his artistic parents insist on celery sticks and carrots, remote rented cottages, and tourist destinations that are “off the beaten track.”

The car journey, anywhere in North America, is by now a staple of Canadian children’s lore, and this family’s adventures in Okefenokee Swamp, on an eccentric Salt Spring Island farm, or on a California beach may well resonate with the charm of familiarity. I was startled to realize that our family, too, was near Blue Hill, Maine, during Hurricane Bob, when the Gay-Homel boys threw themselves into the exhilaration of wild weather. We also met alligators in Okefenokee and tramped through the searing heat of Arizona deserts. Without exaggeration or perceptible stretching of the truth, Gay and Homel manage to convey the sense of fond recollection with which families tell, retell, and pat into shape the peak memories of shared vacations.

While the narrator maintains a believably boyish voice, boasting only slightly about rescuing his family from their feckless follies time and again, he also manages to evoke landscape and emotion with brevity and force. Readers won’t soon forget the terrifying description of a desert sandstorm, the yellow sky looking “like a bruise,” and giant tumbleweeds “running” at the car out of the dark and hitting with a sudden thud.

No matter how absent-minded the parents seem – on a shelling expedition to a Georgia islet, the mother doesn’t notice the inrushing tide until she and the two boys have to swim for their lives – and no matter how mockingly the narrator complains of his parents’ oddball tastes, the prevailing tone is one of familial affection and easy-going good humour.

When I first read Travels with My Family, I wondered how many children would stick with a book that had no narrative arc, no engrossing plot, and none of the cranked-up climaxes so common to middle reader chapter books. Then it occurred to me that each chapter makes a perfect read-aloud, perhaps even for the back seat of a car. Within each mini-travelogue, there’s enough humour and mild excitement to hold attention, and the prose is polished bright, clean, and supple so that it almost reads itself aloud.

An added attraction are the many black-and-white drawings by Gay in her characteristic style: big-headed children with minimal features and a lovable gangliness of limb; lively evocations of weather and landscape with a few quick lines; and a sense of energy, curiosity, and delight in the world.

Most of all, the cumulative impact of this book – despite the narrator’s honour-bound resistance to his parents’ choices – is that the world is a fascinating place, that the smallest incident can yield lasting wonder, and that the best part of a trip may be the transformation of shared experience into a personal narrative that enriches and embellishes a family’s history.