In Crow's Field

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.

In the debut novel of one of Canada’s leading playwrights, Judith Thompson brings us inside the mind of Ana, an eleven-year-old girl in a small American college town in the mid-1960s, who struggles to find the courage to tell the truth about the violent attack that led to the drowning of her best friend. She fears that her inability to speak up is why the Virgin Mary no longer appears to her before her frequent seizures. However, when her family moves to "the limestone city" of Kingston, Ontario, the ghost of her drowned friend appears to help Ana survive the violence she encounters there. In this coming of age story, Ana''s resilience in the face of severe bullying and her life-threatening seizures, along with empowering friendships and a magical sexual awakening, transform her into a young woman who is finally ready to speak truth and take action, no matter the cost …