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A review by crabbygirl
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
3.0
[guessing at the star rating / mining my old FB notes now that they are almost impossible to find]
a few pages before the end of this book, i would have said: what a tour de force -
as it stands though, the sensationalist ending taints the whole book. and is probably why it didn't win the awards it deserved for the first 98% of it
when you pick up such a big book you think: really? do you really need so many pages to tell this tale, or is this vanity? but this is more like three books in one.
i was on pg 375 of an 800+ page book when the visual hit me: the back of a boy in red jeans, a girl in a fluttering blue dress, the turning wheels of a bike echoed through a wheelchair - oh god, this is steven truscot... his story inspired this book.
and then it was sickening. because you know how wrong it's going to turn out, and there's still so much left to read, still so much left to suffer through.
this was the biggest surprise for me: here i'd already read the upsetting story of a child's slow drowning inside the sick mind of a pedophile (and her family's repeated near-misses to see and stop those events) but when i got to the second part of the book - the gross injustice done to a teenage boy - it bothered much more than the first part. why?
because the molested child is a fictional character here, but the boy - the boy was obviously modeled on a real human being and these things really did happen to a flesh and blood man. it stopped being fiction; it stopped being a novel. i couldn't stop reading because i had to get to the other side when it was going to get (marginally) better. i couldn't leave this real human being in the middle of that misery.
the third part of the book is probably where most novels end - the story of what happens afterwards. this father and daughter, each holding a dreadful secret that informs the rest of their lives. this was the most honest, and the saddest part.
i can understand intellectually why the author did what she did with the ending - to turn the tables on the reader's conviction of guilt. but my emotions still can't abide by her ending.
a few pages before the end of this book, i would have said: what a tour de force -
as it stands though, the sensationalist ending taints the whole book. and is probably why it didn't win the awards it deserved for the first 98% of it
when you pick up such a big book you think: really? do you really need so many pages to tell this tale, or is this vanity? but this is more like three books in one.
i was on pg 375 of an 800+ page book when the visual hit me: the back of a boy in red jeans, a girl in a fluttering blue dress, the turning wheels of a bike echoed through a wheelchair - oh god, this is steven truscot... his story inspired this book.
and then it was sickening. because you know how wrong it's going to turn out, and there's still so much left to read, still so much left to suffer through.
this was the biggest surprise for me: here i'd already read the upsetting story of a child's slow drowning inside the sick mind of a pedophile (and her family's repeated near-misses to see and stop those events) but when i got to the second part of the book - the gross injustice done to a teenage boy - it bothered much more than the first part. why?
because the molested child is a fictional character here, but the boy - the boy was obviously modeled on a real human being and these things really did happen to a flesh and blood man. it stopped being fiction; it stopped being a novel. i couldn't stop reading because i had to get to the other side when it was going to get (marginally) better. i couldn't leave this real human being in the middle of that misery.
the third part of the book is probably where most novels end - the story of what happens afterwards. this father and daughter, each holding a dreadful secret that informs the rest of their lives. this was the most honest, and the saddest part.
i can understand intellectually why the author did what she did with the ending - to turn the tables on the reader's conviction of guilt. but my emotions still can't abide by her ending.