Crow

 by Amy Spurway

This is NOT a book to read during a pandemic.  It was a downer.

This is the story about a Cape Breton girl who has escaped her life and nutty family in Cape Breton and got a job with a multilevel marketing company in Toronto.  She gets engaged and thinks her life is great until she discovers her fiance cheating on her. She breaks of the engagement and shortly after learns that she has terminal brain tumours.

She sells her condo in Toronto and all her big city clothes and returns to CB to live with her mother in a trailer.  She is understandably feeling very sorry for herself.  Her mother who is working hard as a cleaner at a hotel gives her some tough love.  We meet many of her zany relatives and friends including one friends who ill mother (who she had been caregiving for) has died, she later tries to commit suicide. Another girlfriend with mental issues has just has a baby.  Crow hooks up with a local guy she liked in high school and shares some weed with him and they have sex.

Her crazy girlfriend convinces her to cut off all her hair.  She regrets this immediately.  The girl, Crow, is getting medical tests but the prognosis is not good and her symptoms and pain are increasing.  She sees crazy lights around people amongst her symptoms.

Then crow finds out she is pregnant, she stops drinking and doing weed but has to think about if she wants to abort the pregnancy.  She decides not to abort, tells the father of the baby who is delighted.  Crow never really new her father, he disappeared before she was born. It is assumed he drowned on his fishing boat. Her father's family have let her mother live on a trailer on the family land but not the evil sister of Crow's father plans to sell the land and boot Crow and her mother out.

As if thinks aren't bad enough, Crows mother is killed in a car accident.  It is then she learns that her family members aren't necessarily crazy, they have gifts, for example her mother was a bit of a healer, perhaps Crow's colours are a gift too, seeing people's emotions.

Crow convinces her boyfriend to marry her.  The wedding celebration will put a temporary halt to planned development work on the property.  They do get married and she has a baby girl.  We think.... maybe... her mother might have healed her...  The man she thought was her father shows up for her mother's memorial service and she finds out that her real father is her father's father and her father actually fathered a child with her aunt (parents of the crazy friend).

But the last chapter is her obituary!  Not what I wanted or needed.

This book did a great job of portraying the quirkiness of people in a small village in the Maritimes, their gossiping, but also their coming together when times are tough.  However, it was a bit of a downer at times like these.  Their was lots of maritime dark humour.