In The Spirit of Scatarie, Lesley-Crewe crafts a hauntingly beautiful island saga set on the remote shores of Scatarie Island off Cape Breton. The novel picks up the lives of three children born on Christmas Day 1922—Mary-Alice, Hardy and Sam—and traces their intertwined journeys from youth to the sweep of mid-century change. Unusually, the narrator is a spirit—Cara—who observes the passage of time and the tides of community from beyond the edge of living. Crewe’s writing strikes the delicate balance between nostalgia and realism. The rhythms of island life—sea, wind, work, joy, loss—are rendered with clarity and affection. The community she describes is small, close-knit and resilient, and the readers feel how the characters’ roots in place shape their lives and their fates. The novel grapples with war-time absence, post-war migration, technological upheaval and the subtle erosion of traditions, yet it does so through the lens of friendship, loyalty and belonging. The ghost-narrator device might have felt gimmicky in lesser hands; here it works because Cara is not simply a spooky presence, but a witness and a confidante—an unseen voice whose reflections deepen the human story rather than distract from it. Crewe gives us characters with distinct personalities: Mary-Alice’s fierce independence, Hardy’s quiet strength and Sam’s restless heart, for example. Their home on Scatarie—its lighthouse, its fishery, its rugged landscape—becomes more than setting; it becomes one of the characters. If there is a limitation, it lies in the novel’s ambition. With multiple decades, numerous characters and shifting historical currents, the story sometimes feels crowded. Some secondary figures blur in memory and certain plot arcs wrap more neatly than one might hope given the complexities introduced. For readers who prefer tighter, leaner narratives this might be a slight frustration. Still, the emotional payoff is strong. The sense of place lingers after the last page, as does the question of what remains when people move on—or when the people move on. The Spirit of Scatarie is not just a remembrance of island life but a meditation on connection, change and the invisible threads that bind us.