It is no spoiler to say that the relationship that develops between Evered and Ava is an extremely complex one and that, as they move from childhood to adolescence, it becomes intimate in ways that I found unsurprising but unsettling. Inspired by a story that author Michael Crummey found in Newfoundland archives, The Innocents is, at times, a deeply disturbing and difficult book. As the siblings grow into adulthood, surviving through the years on meagre catches of fish and basic provisions, their increasing loyalty to each other will come into conflict with their own natures, and with urges that they neither understand nor have names for. As they muddle through the seasons, their isolation is punctured only by occasional supply drops from the nearby township of Mockbeggar, or by chance encounters with the crew of passing ships. Orphaned after an unspecified illness carried away their mother, father, and their baby sister Martha, Evered and Ava must survive alone in the isolated outport cove that they call home with only scant knowledge of the ways of the world. The novel follows twelve-year-old Evered and his sister ten-year-old sister Ava. The Innocents is a haunting novel that is both deeply unsettling and, at the same time, lyrically vivid.

But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. Muddling though the severe round of the seasons, through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. 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.

Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline.

The innocents michael crummey