Known in her native Quebec mainly as a humorist, Lise Dion is being introduced to English-speaking Canadians on a far more sombre note. The Secret of the Blue Trunk (in a fluid translation by Liedewij Hawke) recounts the true, and until recently unknown, early life story of Dion’s mother, a nun from Chicoutimi, Quebec, who spent most of the Second World War in German concentration camps. Armande Martel’s only crimes were her Canadian passport and a diary she kept when she first joined the order in Brittany in the 1930s.

Dion uncovered this chapter in her family’s history while clearing out her mother’s Montreal apartment. In an opening scene that mixes realism with a kind of fairy-tale narrative, the daughter finds a key to the “mysterious, unfathomable, untouchable” blue trunk where her mother stored five notebooks recounting her experiences during the war. Aside from the introductory chapter and a short epilogue, The Secret of the Blue Trunk amounts to a tweaked version of the notebooks, rendering Dion editor and co-author of her mother’s story.

What Dion makes of every writer’s dream scenario is touching and commendable, but never entirely riveting. Aside from shedding light on the ordeals of Canadians and members of religious orders who got swept up in the war, Martel’s narrative is curtailed by the fact that its original author was (and, in essence, remained) a naive, sheltered young nun who didn’t really comprehend the atrocities of the Holocaust. This limitation robs the book of the requisite gravitas. Martel’s infatuation with a (sympathetic) Nazi soldier, for example, plays out more like a teenage crush than a tale of forbidden love.

This is not to deny or underplay Martel’s suffering, but merely to note that her inability to assess the situation in which she found herself, empathetic though she may have been, denudes the narrative of any real power. The fact that Martel’s pre- and post-war life in Quebec proves more captivating only clarifies the shortcomings of the book’s central narrative – shortcomings for which neither mother nor daughter is to blame, but which, for better or worse, rest on their shoulders as partners in the revelation of secrets from a certain blue trunk.