Wild Bird

It’s not easy being a teenaged girl in 1861 Victoria. There are few choices for a girl, and the settlement at Fort Victoria is still young, leaving Kate alone and isolated with few opportunities to form friendships. When an opportunity arises to fulfill her lifelong dream, Kate will be forced to make an impossible choice: give up on love or give up on her dreams. But which will she choose?

In her first work of historical fiction, author Leanne Baugh has created a timely and contemporary feeling story about one young woman’s struggle to define herself in a world that caters primarily to men.

Kate, 16, has always dreamt of being a doctor, but, as the daughter of the town doctor and a girl of certain social standing, her mother dismisses her dreams and points her towards marriage. Even that choice seems to have been taken away from her as she knows that her parents have arranged a marriage with the wealthy, but older, Eamonn O’Brien whose proposal she’ll all but be forced to accept when she turns 17 in a few months.

Kate is intelligent, inquisitive, and independent, and she has no desire to be stuck at home having babies, especially when she’s seen her mother bury a few and nearly die. Kate also knows that her family is in great financial straits and that she has a duty to marry well and help her family.

Contrasting her strict mother is the compassionate Sister Mary, a nun at Kate’s school. Sister Mary feeds Kate’s love of reading and curiosity with a steady diet of books, and she offers Kate a glimmer of hope when she tells her about Elizabeth Blackwell, a woman who graduated medical school in New York. Kate also finds an ally in Lucy, a 14-year-old girl from the Songish tribe who opens Kate’s eyes to bigotry and leads her to question everything she’s been taught about gender and race and the impact of colonization on Black and Native people.

At the same time, Kate’s older brother Arthur, whom the reader only meets through his letters to Kate, is perilously close to flunking out of medical school, costing the family not only his tuition money, but also damaging his and his family’s reputation. Similarly to Kate, he struggles under the weight of his family’s expectations and desperately wants to carve his own path.

The author does an excellent job of painting a picture of what life was like in pre-confederation Canada and particularly of the perils and hardships that the settlers faced, including a smallpox outbreak that not only devastates the Native people but nearly takes a member of Kate’s own family. Baugh also illustrates the power that men such as O’Brien held over women and the limited choices that women such as Kate had.

Overall, Wild Bird is an interesting and informative work of historical fiction, and one that will complement studies of Canadian history in elementary and early secondary classrooms.