Donna Morrissey’s first novel, Kit’s Law, was enthusiastically acclaimed by readers and garnered a handsome clutch of awards and nominations, making it a daunting act to follow. Downhill Chance is a near match.

Its spell takes hold a little more slowly. In a prologue set in Rocky Head on Newfoundland’s North Arm, we encounter Luke Osmond and his cousin Frankie, boys “as brazen as a moulting goose,” and the newcomer, Gid, child of a mysterious fugitive family. But just as the story and language begin to work their magic, we are shifted to the neighbouring community of Basin and another family: Job and Sare Gale and their daughters Clair and Missy. Their world is abruptly shattered when Job leaves for a distant war.

Downhill Chance is set in the period just before Newfoundland joins Confederation, but more important here is the bitter aftermath of the Second World War. Job from the Basin and Joe Osmond from Rocky Head both go to fight, but only Job returns. Three years later he succumbs to terrible wounds to his body and soul. When Sare dies too, Missy stays in the Basin and Clair is sent to Rocky Head. As the two narrative threads come together, the story exerts its power in earnest.

Morrissey’s prose, threaded with echoes of Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, is a perfect fit for her almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and homecomings. For readers unfamiliar with fiction from The Rock, Downhill Chance may read at first like a fantasy, an alternate world with a strange variant language, its characters nursing ancient hurts or bent on redemptive quests. Yet the rural communities Morrissey so vividly depicts are not that far from those found in archetypal small-town Canada.

At the centre of this world is Clair, wounded but steadfast. In a heart-racing conclusion, Missy and Clair and Luke and Gid
all begin to let go of the crippling truths of their youth. After so much affliction, who would begrudge them a happy ending?