It was supposed to be a spellbinding tale of survival but instead the story fell flat. I thought that the plot was meandering and lacked momentum in all the pages that I tried to find some purpose to the plot.

In addition, I didn't care about the characters and the pacing just dragged. The writing, however, was fluid and easy to read. Overall, unfortunately I didn't bother to deal with the slow pace (tediousness) and reading it felt like a chore.

DNF @20%

Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday Books for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
I have read other books by Michael Crummy, but this book left me wanting more, but not in a good way. I was looking for a book that would really capture my interest, but instead I found it rather challenging. I had to force myself to finish.

This is a story of survival set in Newfoundland in the 18th century and two siblings that find themselves orphaned. Alone the two children work to continue their family fishing operation enduring the hardships of the Atlantic Coasts and ghosts from the past.

Try it…you may love it. It just wasn’t for me.

The Innocents is set in the 18th Century in Newfoundland and it was a very atmospheric read. It is the story of a brother and sister who are orphaned and struggle to survive. This was difficult to connect to the characters but received much praise and anticipation from others. Thank you for my advanced copy.

This book makes you think how far you would go for your family. It also makes me think a lot about my dependent tendencies I have with some family members, and how that is affecting my life.

This book I found to be weird... it wasn't a fit for me, and I will be giving it to another reader. I felt that the dynamics between brother and sister and parents, it was all too much and too unrealistic and awkward. It didn't flow well for me, and I often found myself bored. This is not a great pick, in my opinion.

Published by Doubleday on November 12, 2019

The Innocents tells a powerful story of a brother and sister, orphaned and young, alone together, who withstand the threats of nature while trying to make sense of a world they are ill-prepared to understand. The man-against-nature theme is coupled with the theme of innocence and the potential misfortune that accompanies ignorance.

A boy named Evered Best, his sister Ada, and their parents live alone on the Newfoundland coast. They capture seals and catch fish, trading their catch for supplies that are delivered by a ship that only appears once a year. Illness takes the mother one winter and the father soon follows, leaving the children alone in the world. They have rarely met another person. Mary Owen in Mockbeggar, a day away by rowboat, helped their mother deliver a baby named Martha who died in infancy. She was their only point of contact with the outside world.

When spring comes, their supplies are nearly gone and the children are not sure how to go about assuring their survival. They have never left home and have nothing but each other to rely upon. Evered wasn’t old enough to visit the supply ship so he doesn’t know what to expect when it next appears. The ship’s captain is a former church official who might be cheating the Bests — he claims they never trade enough fish to pay the debt they owe for supplies — but he doesn’t seem like a ruthless man. Yet Evered is “just a youngster playing at being a man” who fears that he might not have what it takes to follow in his father’s footsteps, even if the captain is generous in his extension of credit.

While all of the novel’s characters live the hard lives of workers who scrape out an existence, they are all fundamentally decent. The captain wants the children to survive, as do a couple of other helpful people who encounter the children during the course of the story. One of those is a traveler named John Warren, who shows kindness to both Evered and Ada, although Evered isn’t sure that Warren can be trusted with Ada. At the same time, he isn’t sure what not trusting a man with a woman might entail.

The story is one of hardship and hard work that children should scarcely be able to endure. Their discovery of a shipwreck and the horrors it contains frightens them even more than Ada’s first menstruation. A story that a sailor tells about an evil deed done by a man Evered suspects was his father introduces another element of uncertainty into their shifting world.

The story bases much of its drama on the innocence of the two children as they move from preteens to their teen years without learning anything about life beyond survival skills. As they huddle together for warmth at night in their unheated cabin, Evered and Ada both feel the unspoken shame of Evered’s erection. “Shame and pleasure,” Ada thinks, “were the world’s currencies.” They don’t understand the urges they feel — they have no concept of how babies are made — and the reader fears the potential consequences of their innocent ignorance.

The brother and sister would die for each other, yet they hardly know how to confide their fears. Evered’s suspicions about Warren seem to change him, Ada thinks; “she was beginning to suspect a person might not be one simple thing, uniform and constant.” Perhaps they are not enough for each other. “They had all their lives been the one thing the other looked to first and last, the one article needed to feel complete whatever else was taken from them or mislaid in the dark.” One of the key dramatic questions is whether they brother and sister will spend their entire lives together in their isolated cabin, or whether they might look for something more, perhaps in Mockbeggar or even the more distant places that they cannot begin to imagine.

Apart from the intensity of its characterizations, The Innocents is remarkable for its creation of a sense of place. The dangers of isolated living — the threat posed by bears, steel traps capable of breaking a hunter’s leg, unexpected storms that could sink a rowboat, ice that might give way while hunting seal — are illustrated in vivid detail. There is always some vague horror lurking on the horizon, but the greatest horror comes from what Evered and Ada, in their innocence, might do to each other. In that regard, The Innocents combines all the hallmarks of a literary novel with the tension that accompanies a thriller.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A slow-paced story of survival, growth and loyalty.

Crummy is a distinctive writer and in The Innocents, he meticulously portrays the desperate conditions of an unforgiving place and in building the psyche and struggles of quirky orphaned siblings Evered and Ada.

A young brother and sister, Evered and Ada Best, are only 11 and 12 years old when they are left as orphans when a devastating illness takes their parents and baby sister. Their dilemma is made worse by the fact that they live in an isolated cove in Newfoundland. Their contact with and knowledge of the outside world has been minimal. Their parents were taken ill so quickly that they were unable to prepare their children to survive in this desolate place. They know that a ship named “The Hope” comes once a year and that their father took his boat out to the ship with his yearly fish catch and returned with supplies. Now the young boy is in the position of providing for himself and his sister with little knowledge of how to do that. They soon learn how in debt to the owner of “The Hope” they are.

This is much more than a book about survival. It’s a deep look at family and loyalty. I’ve seen comparisons to Charles Dickens’ work and this story. The imperiled, hungry children, the colorful characters they come into contact with and the brilliant writing make it easy to see why. This author is a poet and the language he uses is just lovely. He adds quite a few quaint Newfoundland phrases that I wasn’t familiar with but enjoyed. It’s truly heart wrenching to read of the ebb and flow of the relationship between this brother and sister over the years and the battles they faced, not only with the world around them but with each other. I will now be on the lookout for other books from this excellent author.

Most highly recommended.

4.5, rounded up.

Sweetland was my favorite book of 2015, so I was so delighted that the long four year wait was finally over with Mr. Crummey's new novel. Unsurprisingly, it is both set in Newfoundland, and has a mixture of the harsh realities of that landscape, along with the gorgeous, precise prose for which Crummey is suitably lauded. There are also hints of the supernatural, as in his previous novel, as well as some harrowing set pieces that he renders cinematically, so the reader can't help but picture them in their mind's eye.

My only (very minor) complaint is that it just didn't have the propulsive momentum of the earlier work; it's more languid in pace, and there isn't the strong through line (or indeed, much of a plot in the traditional sense) to carry one along. But reading this reminded me that I NEED to tackle Crummey's back catalog, as he is certainly a one of a kind writer, and I have enjoyed everything he's written so far.

My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday books for the ARC in exchange for this honest and enthusiastic review.

There is a quietness to this story, but there is also a sense of urgency too. Always nice to have a new Crummey to read! I actually have a few older ones by Crummey on my shelf to read and I look forward to reading them soon! I consider him to write "classically Canadian" novels which is due to his certain style of writing - they are generally a slower paced and quieter kind of novel.

I've reviewed on Goodreads only at this time - should I write a larger reviewer for our site, I will upload it here as well.

This book was a beautiful read. The beauty yet sheer isolation; the desperation to survive yet the belief that all will work out. There were many times where I stopped reading and wanted to research the time period, the stories of wrecked ships in the area and the actual story that inspired this book. You become immersed in the story and the fate of Ada and Evered.

Northern Canada. Short summers, long cold winters. Illness and hardship leave a brother and sister orphaned in this harsh country, with only the limited knowledge passed on to them by their parents of how their lives are meant to work. Young, innocent, and fiercely determined, they rely on each other to carry on as the seasons alternately provide plenty followed by crushing scarcity, raging storms, illness, and the joy of unexpected visitors. As the siblings grow into the arduous work of simply surviving, they begin to grow into themselves as well, their loyalty tested in ways as mysterious to them as the shadowy borders of the land they inhabit. This book is at once beautiful and heartbreaking, the writing luminous, the characters well-drawn. Their story is about survival, and family, and how what we don’t know can be either our undoing or our salvation.

So I had to read the first page numerous times because it was so confusing due to a pronoun with an unclear antecedent, and then I just gave up.