The Innocents

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