The Girl in the Backseat.

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

In mid-August, as a two-vehicle convoy containing the six members of the blended, mixed-race Armstrong/Finkle family transports 18-year-old Minerva Armstrong from Vancouver to her first year at the University of Manitoba, Minerva’s Mini Cooper acquires a backseat stowaway at the group’s first overnight stop. Toby, the uninvited rider, lives in a Bountiful-like commune where her father has 14 sister-wives and 47 other children. Aware that her impending 14th birthday will mean her father’s sending her to become the 25th wife of a “prophet” in Texas, Toby, having overheard Minerva’s destination, decides to flee to Winnipeg where she has an aunt who, with her five children, had abandoned the commune two years earlier. While Minerva’s “legitimate” passenger, her 16-year-old dreadlocks-wearing brother, Jacob, wants to tell his mother about Toby, the fugitive girl swears the siblings to secrecy, arguing that the adults would inform the police, who, since she is a runaway, would then return her to her father. The Vancouver-Winnipeg trip could have taken as few as two to three days of Trans-Canada Highway driving, but Minerva’s parents make the journey into a family holiday and select a circuitous, time-consuming route, a situation which increases Toby’s fears that any pursuing Brethren will find her. Though the plot had much promise, its actualization is weak, and the culminating incident, one that sees Toby’s father arriving in the very Winnipeg locale where Toby is to meet her aunt, is simply unbelievable. Other than Toby, characterization is weak as are Charles’s attempts to incorporate racism as a plot element. Not a first-choice purchase.