Way the Crow Flies
Read Way the Crow Flies Online
Authors: Ann-Marie Macdonald
Praise for
The Way the Crow Flies
“One of the finest novels I’ve read in a long, long time….
The Way the Crow Flies
is a brilliant portrayal of child abuse and its consequences, but it is much more than that. It is a fiercely intelligent look at childhood, marriage, families, the 1960s, the Cold War and the fear and isolation that are part of the human condition. More than 50 years ago, after Dorothy Parker read William Styron’s first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
, she said of its young author, ‘He writes like a god.’ I thought of that phrase often as I read
The Way the Crow Flies
, for it is not only beautifully written; it is equally beautiful in its conception, its compassion, its wisdom, even in its anger and pain. Don’t miss it.”—
The Washington Post
“Every bit as luminous and poignant as
Fall On Your Knees…. The Way the Crow Flies
is … liberally sprinkled with small yet resonant grace notes, seemingly offhand observations about matters or sentiments or feelings that will cause you to trip, to stop dead, to smile and say: that’s the way it was, I remember now.”—
The Hamilton Spectator
“MacDonald is an expert storyteller…. The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader’s vision of everything that has gone before. It’s a powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“A gripping, twisty plot with powerful undercurrents of anger, abuse and even murder … MacDonald is a stunningly good writer….
The Way the Crow Flies
… secures for MacDonald a place, forever, in Canadian literature.”—
Calgary Herald
“The pages practically turn themselves … irresistibly readable…. [MacDonald has] written a love song to the innocence and optimism of the post-war generation.”—
Elm Street
“[MacDonald’s] prose has a heart-poundingly powerful effect…. Evokes the time and place meticulously … a huge accomplishment from an awesome talent.”—
NOW
(Toronto)
“[MacDonald’s] prose … is always right and true, clean and penetrating.”
—
Winnipeg Free Press
“The Way the Crow Flies
is a beautiful, compelling and heartbreaking story of a young girl’s loss of innocence and a murder that is to haunt her for the next twenty years…. Her vivid imagination breathes life into her characters and their world: the baby powder and Brylcreem smell of a teenage boy, the vivid pink streamers on a child’s bicycle, the pale perfection of a robin’s egg.”—
Homemakers
“The most exciting thing about
The Way the Crow Flies
… is how big it is. Big as in expansive in human feeling and experience, and weighty with moral and meaning—though not ponderous or pretentious…. It never drags. Its superb, cinematic crafting moves us swiftly from scene to scene….
The Way the Crow Flies
… is stunning proof of MacDonald’s abilities…. [It] is a fantastic novel, not only because it is humorous and sad and suspenseful and entertaining. It is a fantastic novel because it reminds us, as Canadians, of our citizenship in the world.”—
The Gazette
(Montreal)
“Extravagantly ambitious…. At the centre … moves MacDonald’s central and wonderful creation, Madeleine McCarthy. Restless, intelligent and wryly observant, this nine-year-old braves adversity … with authentic resilience and complexity…. She is at once sophisticated and uncomprehending in ways that ring terribly true. Hers is the consciousness that renders this novel compelling…. This gothic
bildungsroman
satisfies.”—
The Globe and Mail
“Extraordinary in its scope and unerringly accurate in its portrayal of life on an air force station in the early 1960s…. It’s all we could have hoped for and more from MacDonald.
The Way the Crow Flies
deserves the BEST accolade found in the term bestseller.”
—
The Chronicle-Herald
(Halifax)
“There is something to MacDonald’s stories, to the outsized tragedy, the awful inevitability, the need to tell and be told, that draws our hunger and our hope toward her midnight visions.”—
The Georgia Straight
(Vancouver)
“MacDonald gives us a totally believable child in a series of brilliantly coloured, action-filled vignettes, kaleidoscopic, fast-moving, as compelling as watching a film…. By any standard
The Way the Crow Flies
is a remarkable achievement.”—
Books in Canada
“MacDonald’s story is absorbing, and her writing perceptive and sometimes poetic.
The Way the Crow Flies
is a thoughtful look at a time and place now gone forever, and the traces that can never be erased.”
—
Detroit Free Press
“Ann-Marie MacDonald’s second novel is a riveting story, her writing is superlative and her heroine is high-minded and intelligent, a veritable Alice in Wonderland as unforgettable as Scout or Salinger’s Phoebe. MacDonald’s book is brilliant on so many levels…. MacDonald creates a perfect time-warped world, authentic and exact.”
—
New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
“[The Way the Crow Flies]
centres on a painful secret that will pull most readers compulsively back to this book until the last page.”—
Flare
“[MacDonald] juggles the entire globe; keeping us keenly aware of the larger politics of this world; her characters’ privations and pain are reflections of a society that is struggling with its own loss of innocence…. All the secrets create a heartsick sense of suspense … on every page. MacDonald’s careful navigation of the minds of her people is astonishingly accurate…. This is a big, beautiful book just waiting for you to walk into its marvellous world.”—
The Daily News
(Halifax)
ALSO BY
A
NN
-M
ARIE
M
AC
D
ONALD
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
Fall On Your Knees
For Mac and Lillian
So many “remember-whens”
We are doomed to choose, and every choice
may entail an irreparable loss
.
Isaiah Berlin
T
HIS
L
AND
I
S
Y
OUR
L
AND
T
HE BIRDS SAW THE MURDER
. Down below in the new grass, the tiny white bell-heads of the lily of the valley. It was a sunny day. Twig-crackling, early spring stirrings, spring soil smell. April. A stream through the nearby woods, so refreshing to the ear—it would be dry by the end of summer, but for now it rippled through the shade. High in the branches of an elm, that is where the birds were, perched among the many buds set to pleat like fresh hankies.
The murder happened near a place kids called Rock Bass. In a meadow at the edge of the woods. A tamped-down spot, as though someone had had a picnic there. The crows saw what happened. Other birds were in the high branches and they saw too, but crows are different. They are interested. Other birds saw a series of actions. The crows saw the murder. A light blue cotton dress. Perfectly still now.
From high in the tree, the crows eyed the charm bracelet glinting on her wrist. Best to wait. The silver beckoned, but best to wait.
ANY
-S
PLENDOURED
T
HINGS
T
HE SUN CAME OUT
after the war and our world went Technicolor. Everyone had the same idea. Let’s get married. Let’s have kids. Let’s be the ones who do it right.
It is possible, in 1962, for a drive to be the highlight of a family week. King of the road, behind the wheel on four steel-belted tires, the sky’s the limit. Let’s just drive, we’ll find out where we’re going when we get there. How many more miles, Dad?
Roads are endless vistas, city gives way to country barely mediated by suburbs. Suburbs are the best of both worlds, all you need is a car and the world is your oyster, your Edsel, your Chrysler, your Ford. Trust Texaco. Traffic is not what it will be, what’s more, it’s still pretty neat. There’s a ’53 Studebaker Coupe!—oh look, there’s the new Thunderbird….
“‘This land is your land, this land is my land….’” A moving automobile is second only to the shower when it comes to singing, the miles fly by, the landscape changes, they pass campers and trailers—look, another Volkswagen Beetle. It is difficult to believe that Hitler was behind something so friendly looking and familiar as a VW bug. Dad reminds the kids that dictators often appreciate good music and are kind to animals. Hitler was a vegetarian and evil. Churchill was a drunk but good. “The world isn’t black and white, kids.”
In the back seat, Madeleine leans her head against the window frame, lulled by the vibrations. Her older brother is occupied with baseball cards, her parents are up front enjoying “the beautiful scenery.” This is an ideal time to begin her movie. She hums “Moon River,” and imagines that the audience can just see her profile, hair blowing back in the wind. They see what she sees out the window, the countryside,
off to see the world
, and they wonder where it is she is off to and what life will bring,
there’s such a lot of world to see
. They wonder, who is this dark-haired girl with the pixie cut and the wistful expression? An orphan? An only child with a dead mother and a kind father? Being sent from her boarding school to spend the summer at the country house of mysterious relatives who
live next to a mansion where lives a girl a little older than herself who rides horses and wears red dungarees?
We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waitin’ ’round the bend…
. And they are forced to run away together and solve a mystery,
my Huckleberry friend…
.