The folk refrain, “Farewell to Nova Scotia, your seabound coast, may your mountains dark and dreary be,” haunts Lesley Choyce’s new history, Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea. Throughout his ambitious compilation of the past, present, and future of the province, Choyce struggles with all that is dark and dreary about this place he and countless others find utterly irresistible.

The result is not a scholarly work, or the kind of cheery souvenir your average tourist would want to pick up in the “local interest” section. Instead, it is a paradoxical love-hate song that reveals as much about Lesley Choyce (who chose to settle here in the ’70s) as it does about the events that shaped Nova Scotia.

Without this personal perspective, Nova Scotia would be a painfully depressing, politically correct chronicle of facts anyone who has done some basic reading on the province will find familiar. In brief chapters broken up by magazine-style headings, Choyce begins with the geographical formation of the province and continues to the present-day destruction of fish stocks. In between, he touches on Micmac society, early exploration, European settlement (with a heavy emphasis on the horrors of British colonization), multiple wars, systemic racism, environmental devastation, and chronic economic hardship.

Choyce, with 40 books under his belt, is an award-winning storyteller and a high-profile member of the local literary scene. As a result, he keeps this sad epic going, often with a refreshingly casual or ironic tone. And as a writer – rather than a historian – he freely editorializes. When Choyce’s surfer-poet persona shines through, and he shows obvious interest in what he is describing, Nova Scotia is most satisfying and original. Occasionally, though, the narrative suffers from its vast scope and some sections end up reading like compulsory course work.

As a personal journey through time, Nova Scotia makes a very readable primer. Choyce does not resolve his ambivalence, but he does manage a surprising degree of optimism that somehow we will be able to learn the lessons of the past and salvage something better for the future.