It is a truism that as Canadians we have traditionally done a poor job telling our own stories. I was reminded of this yet again while watching the excellent first episodes of the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History. Gape-mouthed with stupefaction at the succession of incredible stories, I would frequently turn to my wife and mumble, “Did you know that? I didn’t know that. How come no one ever told me that?”

Maybe they did, and I just wasn’t listening, but I don’t think it was ever taught on my school curriculum. With Canada: Our History, veteran non-fiction writer Rick Archbold (he co-wrote The Discovery of the Titanic with Robert Ballard) tries to bulk up young readers’ emaciated awareness of national history. Unlike Janet Lunn and Christopher Moore, whose 1992 The Story of Canada provided a complete overview of our history starting with the Ice Age, Archbold sticks with the 20th century and focuses on just 15 events (one per brief chapter, arranged chronologically) that he feels will be of the most interest to children. Furthermore, he invents child narrators to tell the stories – an ambitious strategy since it involves imparting historical information (ostensibly Archbold’s first aim) through fiction to make it more palatable. Archbold’s stories are almost always lively and engaging, but he sometimes weakens the credibility of his narrators by burdening them with too much factual information and having them express mature views beyond their years, as a way of presenting both sides of controversial issues, such as the Winnipeg strike and the FLQ crisis.

Not surprisingly, the stories tend to work best when the chosen historical event itself has a dramatic and compact narrative, like the Winnipeg strike, the FLQ crisis, or the 1917 Halifax explosion. Here, the story is narrated by a young journalist who goes in search of his sister and nephew after the harbour explosion (the biggest manmade explosion before the detonation of the atom bomb), which killed or injured more than 10,000 people. In order to enhance verisimilitude, Archbold cleverly opens each chapter with a full-page archival photo, which he uses as a springboard into the story; here, two bandaged children recovering in hospital.

Though Archbold usually uses first-person narration, for his chapter on the Dionne quintuplets he opts for the more unusual second-person singular “you” – perhaps in an attempt to capture how kids tell stories to one another. Here, a girl relates the tale of being bused with her grade eight class to see the quints, against the backdrop of the Depression – an interesting juxtaposition that may explain the impoverished nation’s bizarre fascination with the quintuplets: a distraction. The narrator adores the quints (her favourite is Cécile) but her ambivalence at seeing them displayed like circus animals is clear, even though her catalogue of musings sounds a bit too sophisticated for a besotted groupie: “Here you are standing looking at them through a wire mesh almost as if they were in a zoo….What will happen to them when they get older and realize that they’ve been taken away from their family? What will their lives be like once they have to leave the world of Quintland?” Creepiest of all is an amazing photograph of the gates at Quintland opening as hordes of people run to reach the compound first.

Some of the episodes are particularly interesting because their historical events are so rarely discussed. Not being a native Ontarian, I’d never heard of Hurricane Hazel, the 1954 tropical storm that dumped enough rain over Metro Toronto to sweep houses and families away. Similarly, few people under the age of 45 are likely aware of the controversy surrounding our Canadian flag, hoisted officially on February 15, 1965. Lester Pearson had promised the country its very own flag, but his models triggered outrage from those Anglo-Canadians who were loath to part with the Red Ensign, which prominently featured a Union Jack.

Some of Archbold’s choices, however, make for pallid reading: the opening epistolary account of a young girl immigrating to Saskatchewan in 1905; the birth of the Calgary stampede; and a visit to a deserted Indian village after the potlatch was declared illegal by the government in 1923. All these are interesting topics, but perhaps because they lack a built-in dramatic structure, the stories spun around them are saggy and unfocused. Expo ’67 may have been a formative event in Canada’s sense of national pride, but the way Archbold’s female teen narrator tells it, it was primarily an excellent place to meet cute French-Canadian guys. Interestingly, even the account of the Second World War is so diffuse it creates little tension. A selected event from the war might have been more successful.

This is a very handsome book. A large, clean typeface, excellent page design, and a minimum of sidebars enable the reader to enjoy the main stories without distraction. The book is generous with period photos, and at the end of every chapter, a full-page spread highlights other pivotal events from the same period.

Archbold is wise to have chosen the strategy of fictional child narrators. Even though the results are uneven (and much of this is due to the difficulty of wrestling some of the chosen historical events into mini-dramas), most of the chapters do convey a sense of contagious excitement about Canada’s history. I was swept up in the book’s account of the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit hockey series, narrated by a first-generation Chinese boy in Vancouver. A fiction writer couldn’t have engineered a tenser progression in the seven-game series, culminating in a final make-or-break game on Soviet turf and a winning goal for Canada in the final minute. I almost got out my hockey skates, but then remembered I didn’t own any – and never had. How un-Canadian.