Another is his facility - his gift - with language. It is also one of Crummey’s great strengths as a writer. Neither of these situations, in fact, turns out how one might expect, and this willingness to resist the easy narrative path is one of The Innocents’ great strengths. Similarly, the arrival of a crew of sailors in the cove is loaded with menace. The Beadle, for example, a former churchman who now serves as the accountant on a ship that visits the cove twice each year, trading the family’s dried fish for winter supplies, and seeing their debt growing deeper every season, seems, initially, a figure of malice, of the evils of resource-driven profiteering. In much the same way that Crummey flips that expectation on end, The Innocents resists reader anticipation at every turn. Yes, there are elements of survival, but their youth is much less a factor than one might expect: long winters, poor fishing, limited food and unexpected disasters are components of that life, regardless of age, and Ada and Evered, trained to the work and self-denial all their lives, do surprisingly well. While readers might be expecting a survival story - two children fighting for their lives against the elements - The Innocents is more complex, and much subtler, than that. And, after burying them separately at sea, the youngsters - Evered and his younger sister Ada - are left alone, the only residents of a small cove on Newfoundland’s wild coast, neither of them older than twelve (although they have no real way of knowing their ages). Within two paragraphs, the youngsters’ mother dies. Their mother laid the infant in a shallow trough beside the only other grave in the cove and she sang the lullaby she’d sung all her children to sleep with, which was as much as they had to offer of ceremony.” They lost their baby sister before the first snowfall.

John’s, Nfld., writer Michael Crummey, begins with tragedy.

The innocents michael crummey