Sweetland (Crummey) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Impetuous and imperious, Moses Sweetland is an extraordinary, beautifully realized character, and the supporting cast—including Queenie Coffin, a chain-smoking romance-novel addict who hasn’t left her house in four decades; and the feral Priddle brothers, "Irish twins" born 10 months apart—are scarcely less so. But Sweetland, Crummey’s finest novel yet, reaches its mythic and mesmerizing heights only after the others depart, leaving Moses—a Newfoundland Robinson Crusoe who even encounters a Friday-like dog—alone on his eponymous island, bracing for a bitter winter both seasonal and personal.
Macleans


(Starred review.) Sweetland is both a place—a small island off Newfoundland—and a person—Moses Sweetland—and both have seen better times. The provincial government is offering resettlement money to Sweetland residents, but only if everyone agrees to leave.... Crummey.... [concludes] the book in a way that recalls Aristotle’s maxim from the Poetics: the best endings find a way to be both surprising and inevitable.
Publishers Weekly


Winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada, Crummey sets his new work on a sparsely populated Canadian island. Now the government has offered to resettle folks from the island's one town, Sweetland, provided that everyone agrees to leave. The holdout is Moses Sweetland, whose ancestors settled the town.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) On the small fictional island of Sweetland, just south of Newfoundland, a former lighthouse keeper becomes the last man standing when he refuses to accept a government resettlement package—much to everyone's exasperation.... Through its crusty protagonist, Crummey's shrewd, absorbing novel tells us how rich a life can be, even when experienced in the narrowest of physical confines.
Kirkus Reviews