Good historical fiction re-creates for the reader a real sense of a particular time and place. It's often a question of striking just the right tone rather than blitzing the reader with an overwhelming litany of historical facts and details.

And that's the tone that Janet McNaughton strikes in her second novel for young adults, To Dance at the Palais Royale. McNaughton whirls the reader right into the midst of seventeen-year-old Aggie Maxwell's life. Aggie is about to take an extraordinary chance. She's going to leave the poverty of the little Scottish town of Loughlinter and trek across the Atlantic to a new life in the burgeoning city of Toronto. She is going to join her older sister Emma in Toronto and to work as a domestic servant in order to bring the rest of her family to Canada.

Seeing Toronto through Aggie's eyes is a wonderful experience-we share her sense of wonder and adventure-and we share the drudgery of her life as servant as well. McNaughton certainly isn't a sentimentalist. In depicting a Toronto that is fairly bursting at the seams in the roaring twenties, McNaughton, through Aggie, forces us to look beneath the surface. Aggie is mesmerized by the fancy new Royal York Hotel, the shiny new streetcars, and the sweaty jazz music played at the Palais Royale but she also discovers that as a bastion of Anglo-Saxon values, Toronto can be small-minded, mean-spirited, and racist.

As a domestic working for the up-and-coming Stockwood family in Deer Park and, perhaps more importantly, as an outsider, Aggie has an opportunity to observe the layers that make up Toronto. One of the most moving moments in this book is the connection Aggie makes with the young wife of a Jewish furrier. Rachel Mendorfsky is haunted by the memories of the shtetl she has left behind and the terrible pogrom that she cannot leave behind. Aggie and Rachel share their stories and touch the reader with the depth of the connection that they forge between them.

Aggie's story is a part of Janet McNaughton's own family history. Her mother's three sisters came to Canada in the late twenties to work as domestic servants. "This book is not their story," she writes in an author's note, "but knowing about the experiences of my mother's sisters helped me to create Aggie, and to understand what her life might have been like."

To Dance at the Palais Royale has its moments of glitter and romance but it is its re-creating the other side of Toronto that makes it a remarkable fiction. Aggie Maxwell will stay with you long after you close the pages of Janet McNaughton's novel. 

Jeffrey Canton is program co-ordinator for the Canadian Children's Book Centre and reviews books for adults and children on CBC's Fresh Air.