In Crow's Field

The story of one shy girl’s path out of silence.

The coming of age of Ana, a shy girl who lives mostly in her imagination, as in the real world she is completely dominated by her playmate Frances, and by the Catholic Church. The novel is the story of her path out of silence.

A seventeen-year-old girl, Ana, is lying contentedly in an abandoned farmer’s field outside of Kingston, Ontario, revelling in the August sunset, when her mind is transported to another time and place.

Like a dream, but real: She and her friend Frances are eight years old, crawling in the grasses of Crow’s Field in Middletown, Connecticut, collecting wildflowers, when two crackly male voices ask them what they are doing. So begins the reliving of a forgotten attack with the only witness having been her secret best friend Patty, who stumbles on the scene and then, fleeing the attackers, tries to swim across the turbulent Connecticut River and drowns. Ana finds she cannot speak to save her friend, and is therefore abandoned by the Virgin Mary, who no longer appears to her before her grand mal seizures.

When Ana’s family moves to Canada, she is overjoyed as she is sure she has escaped. Her teenage years are a time of new friends, of being haunted by her secret best friend’s ghost, of discovering her sexuality, of bullying so severe it caused a seizure that would have killed her had she not screamed herself back into life. When she meets the charismatic Satan’s Choice member Matthieu at the local fairgrounds, and they fall in love in the Haunted House ride, she feels more alive than she ever has. Slowly but surely, Ana becomes a woman who is willing to act and to speak, no matter what the cost.