The Innocents by Michael Crummey

*FINALIST FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE *FINALIST FOR THE 2019 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD *FINALIST FOR THE 2019 ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE *WINNER OF THE 2020 THOMAS RADDALL ATLANTIC FICTION AWARD *NATIONAL BESTSELLER *NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY The Globe and Mail • CBC • Toronto Star • Maclean's Crummey's novel has the capacity to change the way the reader sees the world. —Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury Citation From bestselling, award-winning author Michael Crummey comes a sweeping, heart-wrenching, deeply immersive novel about a brother and sister alone in a small world. A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. As they fight for their own survival through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. This novel is richly imagined and compulsively readable, a riveting story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister. By turns electrifying and heartbreaking, it is a testament to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of our individual selves.

Incestuous and yet I still found enjoyment - mainly for the location this novel takes place in and the whimsical nature of children meeting darkness in their environment and amongst themselves.

Thank you to the GR Giveaway organizers for a copy of the book. I really wanted to read this novel. I'm left with the sense that it is truly a NOVEL. a piece of literature. There were things about the story that made me feel uncomfortable and at times I didn't “enjoy” the read, however it is not a summer beach novel. It is a book which is extremely well written and the author spent great time pacing out the ebb and flow of information and description. His descriptions paint the cove and isolation of Eastern Canada in your minds eye brilliantly. As you read the novel it is easy to imagine this tine and place. You are capable through the writing to envision how this novel would look in visual format. For that alone perhaps I should rate it 5 stars. Perhaps in tome I will up my rating. Today I will leave it at 4 stars based solely on my personal bias that I felt the pacing a bit too slow and I was not always driven to pick it up and finish. In truth however I wonder if that has more to do with my coming recently from summer reading where action and pace are the driving narrative of quickly inhaled paperbacks.
I believe this book will stand the test of time and I will return to it again for a second reading.

Ada and Evered lose their infant sister before the first snowfall. The ground is frozen solid when they lose their mother, their father tipping her out into the black winter ocean. He joins her shortly, passing before the new year. Ada and Evered are 11 and 9 and in the four opening pages find themselves completely alone on a desolate crag off the coast of Newfoundland that would come to be known as Orphan's Bay.

It's a hell of a start. The brother and sister barely eke out the winter months, awaiting salvation with the biannual visit of a supply ship called The Hope. They are replenished but refuse to leave their tiny cove and begin to set into the summer's chores.

“Their severe round with little variation but the wheel of the seasons and nothing but the slow pendulum of The Hope's appearance to mark time on a human scale.”

Against that gruelling backdrop the siblings come across a ship frozen in the ice and the horrors within, meet Captain Solomon Truss from Oxfordshire who saves their lives, John Warren and his crew from the HMS Medusa come limping into the cove after their mainmast is split in an Atlantic storm.

The kids are in good hands with Micheal Crummey, who has a poet's eye for language sprinkled with the regionalisms of his home province. It's a wondrous story inspired by a paragraph Crummey came across from an 18th century clergyman who discovered a brother and sister living in an isolated cove, the sister clearly pregnant. When he asked about their situation he was promptly shooed off the island at gunpoint. So yeah - I have to admit a bit of ick here, despite being handled well and in a way that made sense. Crummey still pulls it off.

Video review here: https://youtu.be/8Q2vg9HsLWY