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A Walk Through a Window, by K.C. Dyer, Doubleday Canada, 227 pages, $14.95

If you want a little fantastical, suspenseful fiction with your history, then a book by K.C. Dyer is your route. Time travel plays a key role in A Walk Through a Window , aimed at children 10 years and up. It's a theme she's successfully mined before in her trilogy comprised of Seeds of Time , Secrets of Light and Shades of Red . This time, stories of Canada's historical roots are the catalyst for change and discovery in an otherwise jaded teen.

When 13-year-old Darby Christopher is exiled by her parents to PEI for the summer, for reasons she doesn't quite understand, she thinks it's some sort of punishment. After all, she's a sophisticated, skateboarding teen who lives off Toronto's Yonge Street, Canada's longest roadway in the most important city in the country. So what on earth could hold her fascination in a small town on a remote island?

Not only that, but her Gramps is always confused and causing trouble for her Nan, who makes her do chores and forbids her to ride her board. Everyone in the neighbourhood is too nice, there's no computer, video games or Internet, and hardly any kids her age to hang around with.

It all seems very bleak and boring until she meets Gabe, a boy around her own age who claims to live in a run down old house Darby's grandfather was born in. With a peculiar French accent, Gabe is the first to suggest to Darby that maybe she should get to know the history of PEI and her Irish-Scottish heritage before she dismisses it as uninteresting.

With Gabe's help, Darby walks over the windowsill and through a broken window of the old house and into three different history lessons about Canada's rich past.

First she discovers the “People” as they gather to discuss a plan to follow the caribou to new land. When she returns (with a massive migraine that results in a house call from the doctor), she heads to the library to find that what she was witnessing was the first nations' migration, some 12,000 years before, over an ice bridge through the Bering Strait into Canada.

Darby's second trip back in time, still orchestrated by Gabe, but with less coercion, is aboard a “coffin” ship bringing Irish settlers to Montreal. She watches and listens as a young brother and sister write a letter home to their father, painting the horrific, disease-ridden voyage with a rosy hue. She learns about the potato famine that devastated Ireland, and watches as a mother jumps ship after her baby is thrown overboard because she has the pox.

Back in the real world, Darby has her own tragedy to contend with when her Gramps dies suddenly of a heart attack on their promised trip to the beach. Her parents arrive from Toronto with a big surprise that explains her summer in PEI, but all Darby can think about is one last walk through the window.

This time she doesn't need Gabe. She finds herself on another ship, this one bringing Scottish immigrants to the eastern shores of Canada. She sees a man who looks just like her departed Gramps and learns it's his great, great grandfather, with printing press in tow to start up a new business in Canada. Darby looks to the shore that she can tell is PEI as it must have been back then, and feels a whole new appreciation for her native home.

In A Walk Through the Window , K.C. Dyer presents a jarring contrast between historical hardships and the relative ease of the present. She's woven tales of Canada's diverse beginnings, with a very contemporary story about a teenager whose imagination needs a little jolt of inspiration not readily offered in today's information age. With no opportunity to consult Google for further investigation into the scenes Gabe has shown her, she resorts to the good old-fashioned library, where the librarians are only too happy to help an inquisitive teen. With no video games to distract her, Darby must fill time listening to her grandparents' stories of their young lives and courtship and Gramps' time in Vietnam.

When her parents suggest a drive home rather than a plane ride, thinking it's time she learned about Canada, she is bursting with inner pride about all she has somehow managed to teach herself. She promises Nan she'll be back next summer.

Carla Lucchetta is a Toronto-based writer and television producer.