Living Freight

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Thirteen-year-old Emma is “living freight.” To escape the horrors of
a Victorian workhouse, she has allowed herself to be shipped by
paddlesteamer to Vancouver Island with 60 other female teenage orphans
or paupers. Once in Victoria, they are expected to accept the first
marriage proposal they receive or become domestic servants to the
colony’s growing middle class. So far, Emma has known only a life of
overwork and near-starvation. Because she cannot read, she does not
suspect that her only two possessions—a ring and a deathbed letter
from her mother—contain important clues to the identity of her father,
whom she has never met.

This hard-hitting novel explores a rarely discussed episode in
English-Canadian history: the export of female British children to
Canada to provide cheap labor and white brides for the male-dominated
work force. Gaetz’s bold and colorful prose captures the reader
immediately, but the plot seems as if the author intended the novel to
be a much larger work. The 100-day steamship journey, for example, is
reduced to a few pages and the death of Emma’s only friend, Elizabeth,
is barely discussed. The story’s culmination hinges on coincidence of
truly Dickensian dimensions, but Gaetz has the writing skills to make it
work. Recommended.