The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald's follow-up novel to her bestselling debut (and Oprah Book Club pick), Fall on Your Knees, opens in 1962 when the McCarthy family moves from Germany to their new home on a Canadian air force base near London, Ontario. Madeleine, eight and already a blossoming comic, is particularly close with her father, Jack, an air force officer. Her loving Acadian mother, Mimi, and older brother Mike round out this family, whose simple goodness reflects the glow of an era that seemed like paradise. But all that is about to change. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming, and Jack, loyal and gullible, suddenly has an important task to carry out that involves a scientist--a former Nazi--in Canada.

While Jack scrambles to keep his activities hidden from his wife, Madeleine too is learning to keep secrets (about a teacher at school). The Way the Crow Flies is all about the fertility of lies, how one breeds another and another. Although the writing flows with a strong current, the profusion of pop references, especially ad slogans, grows tiresome. The author can, however, capture a lovely image in few words: "The afternoon intensifies. August is the true light of summer" and "yes, the earth is a woman, and her favorite food is corn." At times the story is marvelously compelling, as the mystery of a horrific murder in the fields near the base is unravelled. When events lead to a trial and its outcome, the story peaks, in a conclusion with no easy answers. The last third of the book takes place, for the most part, 20 years later. Here the novel meanders somewhat, losing its ability to captivate with the same intensity. The reader longs to return to the earlier world, which MacDonald has captured in vital detail. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly
A little girl's body, lying in a field, is the first image in this absorbing, psychologically rich second novel by the Canadian author of the bestselling Fall on Your Knees. Then the focus shifts to the appealing McCarthy family. It's 1962, and Jack, a career officer in the RCAF, has just been assigned to the Centralia air force base in Ontario. Jack's wife, Mimi, is a domestic goddess; their children, Mike, 12, and Madeleine, 8, are sweet, loving kids. This is an idyllically happy family, but its fate will be threatened by a secret mission Jack undertakes to watch over a defector from Soviet Russia, who will eventually be smuggled into the U. S. to work on the space program. Jack is an intensely moral, decent guy, so it takes him a while to realize that the man is a former Nazi who commanded slave labor in Peenemande, where the German rockets were built in an underground cave. Meanwhile, Madeleine is one of several fourth graders who are being molested by their teacher, and one of them winds up dead in that field. McDonald is an expert storyteller who can sustain interest even when the pace is slow, as it is initially, providing an intricate recreation of life on a military base in the 1960s. As the narrative darkens, however, it becomes a chronicle of innocence betrayed. The exquisite irony is that both Madeleine and her father, unbeknownst to each other, are keeping secrets involving the day of the murder. The subtheme is the cynical decision by the guardians of the U.S. space program to shelter Nazi war criminals in order to win the race with the Russians. The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader's vision of everything that has gone before. It's a powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Madeleine McCarthy is 8 years old when her family moves to a quiet air force base in Ontario in the early '60s. Madeleine's personal life of new school friends, Brownies, unusual neighbors, and a sexually abusive teacher is set amidst the political environment of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, and the space race. Ann-Marie MacDonald reads her own work, successfully evoking the wonder and imagination of a child. Her calm, dulcet tones deepen the tragedy of a local murder and corresponding miscarriage of justice. The truth is devastating. MacDonald's male British accents are slightly wobbly, but Madeleine's mother, Mimi, has a pitch-perfect French-Canadian accent. A.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Canadian playwright MacDonald follows up the best-selling Fall on Your Knees (1997), an Oprah Book Club selection, with a sweeping family story that often reads like a thriller. Set during the early sixties on a suburblike Canadian air force base, the novel pays homage to the optimism of the era and also exposes it as a time of dangerous innocence. Madeleine is an exuberant eight-year-old still attached to her stuffed Bugs Bunny. When her creepy new teacher begins keeping her and other girls after school for "exercises," which gradually morph into full-blown sexual abuse, she feels she cannot talk about it because it is so alien to the sunny, wholesome world of her family. Meanwhile, her straight-arrow father, Jack, has been recruited by his revered former flying instructor, who now works for intelligence, to baby-sit an ex-Nazi scientist; Jack is soon faced with a moral dilemma tinged with the cynical overtones of realpolitik. The characters, family dynamics, and time period are all sharply rendered and tightly tied to the overriding theme of innocence betrayed. But perhaps MacDonald's most impressive accomplishment is her uncanny ability, much like Donna Tartt's in The Little Friend [BKL S 1 02], to vividly re-create the wonder, humor, and fears of childhood. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
?The prime contender for book of the fall. [T]his is an engaging and ingeniously plotted portrait of a ?perfect? 1960s Canadian family coming to terms with all its imperfections.?
?Quill & Quire

?[A] richly involving novel. MacDonald ? makes Jack and Mimi ring true emotionally, without cliché.?
?The Bookseller

?A little girl?s body, lying in a field, is the first image in this absorbing, psychologically rich second novel by the Canadian bestselling author of Fall On Your Knees. ?MacDonald is an expert storyteller, providing an intricate recreation of life on a military base in the 1960s?a chronicle of innocence betrayed?The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader?s vision of everything that has gone before. It?s a powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message.?
?PW Daily starred review

?Remarkable?an engrossing, disturbing and layered tale.?
?Chicago Tribune

?One of the finest novels I've read in a long, long time?.Often her narrative explodes with the sheer joy of writing well?.The Way the Crow Flies is a brilliant portrayal of child abuse and its consequences, but it is much more than that. It is a fiercely intelligent look at childhood, marriage, families, the 1960s, the Cold War and the fear and isolation that are part of the human condition.
?Washington Post

?[MacDonald?s] prose?is always right and true, clean and penetrating.?
?Winnipeg Free Press

?MacDonald?s much anticipated follow-up to Fall on Your Knees lives up to the hype. ? MacDonald expertly takes the reader through the cold-war era and delivers a twister of an ending to make the 700-plus page journey worth the trip.?
?The Coast (Halifax)

?[A] gripping, twisty plot with powerful undercurrents of anger, abuse and even murder?.MacDonald is a stunningly good writer?.Her novels are fleshy books, solid as their length and heft?.MacDonald doesn?t falter?.The Way The Crow Flies?secures for MacDonald a place, forever, in Canadian literature.?
?The Calgary Herald

?[A] hopeful and satisfying finale?.[T]his novel has close to perfect pitch.?
?The Edmonton Journal

?MacDonald?s careful navigation of the minds of her people is astonishingly accurate; so wholly formed are her characters that you may find yourself talking out loud to them as you read. She has us. ...[A] profoundly Canadian novel?.This is a big, beautiful book just waiting for you to walk into its marvellous world and then walk out some days later, a slightly different, perhaps slightly sadder person.?
?The Daily News (Halifax)

?[Readers will] find The Way The Crow Flies an engaging, very cleverly written coming-of-age story about a precocious young girl named Madeleine.?
?The London Free Press

?The Way the Crow Flies [is] a mesmerizing recreation of a vanished era and a lost childhood. ... [MacDonald?s] depiction of a vulnerable girl almost destroyed by the confluence of global politics and local murder is rendered with beauty and passion.?
?Maclean?s

?Ann-Marie MacDonald?s big novel generates a strong emotional pull?.suspense and the evocation of feeling on the author?s part continue to drive the reader?s interest forward to the very last page?.MacDonald touches some deeply moving and insightful themes ? the deliberate assertion of nothingness which is behind human evil, the effort of guilty children to shield their innocent parents from knowledge.?
?Toronto Star

?[E]xtraordinary in its scope and unerringly accurate in its portrayal of life on an air force station in the early 1960s?.It?s all we could have hoped for and more from MacDonald. The Way the Crow Flies deserves the BEST accolade found in the term bestseller, while not all of the wildly popular books do.?
?The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

?[T]he pages practically turn themselves?irresistibly readable?.[MacDonald has] written a love song to the innocence and optimism of the post-war generation.?
?Elm Street

?Neither Deafening nor Garbo Laughs?match the combination of ambition and achievement that marks The Way the Crow Flies, a mesmerizing recreation of a vanished era and a lost childhood?.Her depiction of a vulnerable girl almost destroyed by the confluence of global politics and local murder is rendered with beauty and passion?.Universal truth through the alchemy of writing.?
?Brian Bethune, Maclean?s

?This extraordinary follow-up to Fall on Your Knees, is both a head-spinning murder mystery and an absorbing exploration of morality, innocencelost and the lengths to which parents and children will go to protect each other. Astonishing in its depth and breadth, it artfully weaves one family?s struggles into the fabric of the Cold War.?
?People magazine, Critic?s Choice

?Every bit as luminous and poignant as Fall On Your Knees?. The Way The Crow Flies is?liberally sprinkled with small yet resonant grace notes, seemingly offhand observations about matters or sentiments or feelings that will cause you to trip, to stop dead, to smile and say: that?s the way it was, I remember now.?
?The Hamilton Spectator

?The most exciting thing about The Way The Crow Flies?is how big it is. Big as in expansive in human feeling and experience, and weighty with moral and meaning ? though not ponderous or pretentious?. [I]t never drags. Its superb, cinematic crafting moves us swiftly from scene to scene?. The Way The Crow Flies?is stunning proof of MacDonald?s abilities?. [It] is a fantastic novel, not only because it is humorous, and sad and suspenseful and entertaining. It is a fantastic novel because it reminds us, as Canadians, of our citizenship in the world.?
?The Gazette (Montreal)

?A gripping, insightful cinematic tale?.I could not put it down?.She recreates a child?s world, with its own logic that is simultaneously completely convincing and a ghastly distortion of adult reality. The sweetness never veers into soggy nostalgia thanks to the author?s crisp intelligence?[Ann-Marie MacDonald] knows what news stories today make readers wince, then re-examine their own and their children?s lives. The Way the Crow Flies tells a gripping tale, and has the power to illuminate the way we think about the modern world.?
?Charlotte Gray, National Post

?MacDonald?s central and wonderful creation, Madeleine McCarthy?is at once sophisticated and uncomprehending, in ways that ring terribly true. Hers is the consciousness that renders this novel compelling well beyond the level of its highly competent whodunit plot.?
?Claire Messud, The Globe and Mail

?The Way the Crow Flies is a big book. Do not be intimidated. It is a totally absorbing, craftily plotted, wonderfully written saga. Building upon itself, chapter by chapter, ?Crow? is suspenseful, faithful to its time period, and comes complete with a rather shocking final plot twist. It has been seven years since MacDonald?s debut novel. Let?s hope that another seven do not go by before she writes her third.?
?The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

?The story is told mostly from the point of view of Madeleine, a precocious youngster who?s in grade 4 at the school serving the children of servicemen living in PMQs?.Madeleine?s story is about picking up the pieces so she can ?reinhabit? herself. ?That is the journey. And that?s romance. That is the true meaning of romance, where you have quite a bit at the beginning, you lose everything, and at the end of the story you have more than you began with? [says MacDonald].?
?Canadian Press

?[U]nfolds relentlessly?[MacDonald?s] prose has a heart-poundingly powerful effect. The book is about secrets, how hard they are to tell and how keeping them can distort intimate connections?.
[E]vokes the time and place meticulously?a huge accomplishment from an awesome talent.?
?Now Magazine (Toronto)

?[T]here is something to MacDonald?s stories, to the outsize tragedy, the awful inevitability, the need to tell and be told, that draws our hunger and our hope toward her midnight visions.?
?The Georgia Straight

?The Way the Crow Flies is a beautiful, compelling and heartbreaking story of a young girl?s loss of innocence and a murder that is to haunt her for the next 20 years?. Her vivid imagination breathes life into her characters and their world: the baby powder and Brylcreem smell of a teenage boy, the vivid pink streamers on a child?s bicycle, the pale perfection of a robin?s egg.?
?Homemakers

?The Way the Crow Flies is the most disturbing piece of fiction I have ever encountered. Ann-Marie MacDonald?s second novel is a riveting story, her writing is superlative and her heroine is high-minded and intelligent, a veritable Alice in Wonderland as unforgettable as Scout or Salinger?s Phoebe. MacDonald?s book is brilliant on so many levels?. MacDonald creates a perfect time warped world, authentic and exact.?
?New Brunswick Reader

?This dark thriller, set mostly in the early ?60s, is part coming-of-age story, part Cold War thriller and part murder mystery, all wrapped around a fascinating history lesson. Like her first novel, it centres on a painful secret that will pull most readers compulsively back to this book until the last page.?
?Flare

?Ann-Marie MacDonald?s?Can lit is both accessible and glamorous, two qualities for which we aren?t usually recommended and that offend all the right people. ? The book itself is at once a spy intirgue and a historical melodrama?. [MacDonald] is intrepid, exploring the world?s complexity through her characters.?
?Hour (Montreal)

?[A]n engrossing read with a detective-novel appeal.?
?The Gazette

?The Way the Crow Flies?is at once informingly historical, moving, and deeply endearing. MacDonald effectively tells the story from the perspectives of a housewife, a military man, and their nine-year-old daughter. A shrouded mystery makes this fictional novel a real page-turner. MacDonald?s language is rich and full of imagery, and relevant to any reader.?
?Kitchener-Waterloo Record

?Ann-Marie MacDonald?s The Way the Crow Flies is a terrific read. ? MacDonald brings back not only the temper of living on an air-base at the time of possible nuclear threat but also the past times and music that coloured the lives of those living in Southwestern Ontario.?
?The London Free Press

?MacDonald gives us a totally believable child in a series of brilliantly coloured, action-filled vignettes, kaleidescopic, fast-moving, as compelling as watching a film?.Survival of the emotional rollercoaster of this long and demanding text is also a matter for celebration. However, one reader?s rejection of the haste and overabundance of the final section will be another reader?s intense satisfaction. By any standard The Way the Crow Flies is a remarkable acheivement.?
?Books in Canada

?[T]he colorful visual details of an idyllic Canadian air-force family in the early ?60s are cinematic?.Macdonald?s multiple plot lines are meticulously woven together. The book is thoroughly researched and the end result is an engaging and complex whodunnit with heart.?
?Women?s Post

Book Description

In her highly anticipated new novel, Ann-Marie MacDonald takes us back to a postwar world. For eight-year-old Madeleine McCarthy, her family's posting to a quiet air force base near the Canadian-American border is at first welcome, secure as she is in the love of her family, and unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in his own web of secrets. The early sixties, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through Madeleine's rich imagination as she draws us into her world.

But the base is host to some intriguing inhabitants, including the unconventional Froehlich family, and the odd Mr. March, whose power over the children is a secret burden that they carry. Then tragedy strikes, and a very local murder intersects with global forces, binding the participants for life. As the tension in the McCarthy household builds, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine learns about the ambiguity of human morality -- a lesson that will become clear only when the quest for the truth, and the killer, is renewed twenty years later.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her highly anticipated new novel, Ann-Marie MacDonald takes us back to a postwar world. For Madeleine McCarthy, high-spirited and eight years old, her family's posting to a quiet air force base near the Canadian-American border is at first welcome, secure as she is in the love of her family and unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in his own web of secrets. The early sixties, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through the rich imagination of a child as Madeleine draws us into her world.

But the base is host to some intriguing inhabitants, including the unconventional Froehlich family, and the odd Mr. March, whose power over the children is a secret burden that they carry. Then tragedy strikes, and a very local murder intersects with global forces, binding the participants for life. As the tension in the McCarthys' household builds, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine learns about the ambiguity of human morality — a lesson that will become clear only when the quest for the truth, and the killer, is renewed twenty years later.

The Way the Crow Flies is a novel that is as compelling as it is rich. With her unerring eye for the whimsical, the absurd, and the quintessentially human, Ann-Marie MacDonald stunningly evokes the pain, confusion, and humor of childhood in a perilous adult world. At once a loving portrayal and indictment of an era, The Way the Crow Flies is a work of great heart and soaring intelligence.

About the Author

Novelist and dramatist Ann-Marie MacDonald is the author of the internationallybestselling and award-winning novel Fall on Your Knees. She is also the playwright of Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet, which won the Governor General's Award for Drama. She lives in Toronto.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

A novel of the cold war whose main characters bear the name of McCarthy? Sure. As we are cautioned in Ann-Marie MacDonald's new novel, some things can only be ''caught by the corner of the eye. Like phosphorescence in a cave; look away and you will see.'' And so these characters hail from Canada, have nothing to do with Senator Joe, and their baby-boom family gives us a parallax view of sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis, the arms race and the space race, the brain drain from East to West, even military intelligence games, from the shadow of empire. — Art Winslow

The Washington Post

The Way the Crow Flies is a brilliant portrayal of child abuse and its consequences, but it is much more than that. It is a fiercely intelligent look at childhood, marriage, families, the 1960s, the Cold War and the fear and isolation that are part of the human condition...it is not only beautifully written; it is equally beautiful in its conception, its compassion, its wisdom, even in its anger and pain. Don't miss it.— Patrick Anderson

Publishers Weekly

A little girl's body, lying in a field, is the first image in this absorbing, psychologically rich second novel by the Canadian author of the bestselling Fall on Your Knees. Then the focus shifts to the appealing McCarthy family. It's 1962, and Jack, a career officer in the RCAF, has just been assigned to the Centralia air force base in Ontario. Jack's wife, Mimi, is a domestic goddess; their children, Mike, 12, and Madeleine, 8, are sweet, loving kids. This is an idyllically happy family, but its fate will be threatened by a secret mission Jack undertakes to watch over a defector from Soviet Russia, who will eventually be smuggled into the U. S. to work on the space program. Jack is an intensely moral, decent guy, so it takes him a while to realize that the man is a former Nazi who commanded slave labor in Peenemande, where the German rockets were built in an underground cave. Meanwhile, Madeleine is one of several fourth graders who are being molested by their teacher, and one of them winds up dead in that field. McDonald is an expert storyteller who can sustain interest even when the pace is slow, as it is initially, providing an intricate recreation of life on a military base in the 1960s. As the narrative darkens, however, it becomes a chronicle of innocence betrayed. The exquisite irony is that both Madeleine and her father, unbeknownst to each other, are keeping secrets involving the day of the murder. The subtheme is the cynical decision by the guardians of the U.S. space program to shelter Nazi war criminals in order to win the race with the Russians. The finale comes as a thunderclap, rearranging the reader's vision of everything that has gone before. It's a powerful story, delicately layered with complex secrets, told with a masterful command of narrative and a strong moral message. 8-city author tour. (Oct. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews