Mary Sheppard’s second novel in the continuing series Tales from Cook’s Cove tells the story of Issy Heffernan, a young girl in outport Newfoundland in the early 1970s. Issy feels awkward and isolated, in part because she cannot read. Her life is not an easy one – her father works away, her mother is bedridden and ill-tempered, and her much older sister Louise (the school principal) is bitter and resentful, especially of “stupid” Issy whose birth brought her home from the city and university. 

Issy dreams of leaving home and school – she knows she’ll never pass Grade 9 and go to the high school across the bay – and of moving to the mainland. She misses her only true friend, Wish, who moved to Toronto when his parents died, and her kind and patient great-aunt Lady, who recently passed away.

But things change, and Issy is drawn out of herself. When she and her sister come to the aid of a sick student, the course is set for Issy to learn to read, to risk making new friends, to see her many strengths, and to recognize the beauty and value of her home. Louise, too, undergoes a transformation, as does everyone in Issy’s family. 

One for Sorrow acknowledges the strength and uniqueness of outport culture. (The epigraphs defining words of Newfoundland dialect are extraneous, however, and make a rich and beautiful language seem quaint.) Accessible and entertaining, the novel develops the subtleties of the relationships between Issy, her family, and her friends quite nicely, although rich terrain has been left unexplored: important emotional events that could reveal much about the characters are glossed over, used to propel the plot forward without ever being really plumbed.