Full disclosure: I met the premise of this novel with a groan. Middle-aged woman with brain tumours goes home to her rural Cape Breton community to die? That conjured up a) the sort of earnestly bleak kind of CanLit that feels medicinal or b) a Lifetime movie mash-up of. It was a toss-up for which option depressed me more. Thankfully, as is often the case, the back-of-the-book blurb proved untrustworthy, in the best possible way.
This debut comes at you, to use the Cape Breton parlance, like a puck in the teeth. From the first line, it’s a novel that makes demands of its reader. Our narrator, Stacey Fortune, comes on strong, a bit like those people who tell you their entire life story within 15 minutes of meeting them. Like the pot of tea forever brewing on her mother Effie’s stove, Crow is a strong flavour: bracing, bold and, at times, bitter with a brassy bite.
It also demands much of a reader’s tolerance for the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink school of plotting. The book begins with a terminal diagnosis, but that’s just chapter one. Before you’ve even cracked the middle of the spine,tosses into the pot a missing father, an unexpected pregnancy, a shocking death and a healthy serving of some magical realism, and rigorously stirs it with at least two different love triangles.