Crow
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4.3 • 39 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner, IPPY Award for Best First Book - Fiction and Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Fiction
Runner-up, Leacock Medal for Humour
Shortlisted, Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award and Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction
Long-Shortlisted, 2020 ReLit Award (Novel Category)
When Stacey Fortune is diagnosed with three highly unpredictable — and inoperable — brain tumours, she abandons the crumbling glamour of her life in Toronto for her mother Effie's scruffy trailer in rural Cape Breton. Back home, she's known as Crow, and everybody suspects that her family is cursed.
With her future all but sealed, Crow decides to go down in a blaze of unforgettable glory by writing a memoir that will raise eyebrows and drop jaws. She'll dig up "the dirt" on her family tree, including the supposed curse, and uncover the truth about her mysterious father, who disappeared a month before she was born.
But first, Crow must contend with an eclectic assortment of characters, including her gossipy Aunt Peggy, hedonistic party-pal Char, homebound best friend Allie, and high-school flame Willy. She'll also have to figure out how to live with her mother and how to muddle through the unsettling visual disturbances that are becoming more and more vivid each day.
Witty, energetic, and crackling with sharp Cape Breton humour, Crow is a story of big twists, big personalities, big drama, and even bigger heart.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Stacey Fortune is doing all right for a thirtysomething from a small town. She’s living in Toronto and building a career for herself, but then she discovers she’s actually dying. The heroine’s terminal brain cancer isn’t the most remarkable part of Amy Spurway’s debut novel. Crow is funny, and it isn’t just funny for a book about death—it’s funny, full stop. Spurway writes with a particular brand of acerbic Cape Breton humour, and the story soars (pun intended) on the hilarity of Stacey reconnecting with her hometown friends and relatives. There’s a quick-witted strangeness to Crow; we wouldn’t be surprised if Spurway becomes something of an East Coast Heather O’Neill in a few years’ time.
