Judith Thompson's In Crow's Field​

Reviewed by Maria Meindl

(Cormorant Books, 2026)

In Crow’s Field is a tough book. Its narrator, Ana, is the target of violence from her earliest childhood through her teen years, when the book reaches its devastating conclusion. The lively, fanciful tone of Ana’s narration is at odds with her observations about the world and her role in it, but the realities Ana does not let herself acknowledge are all too obvious to the reader. Introducing the character she considers her best friend, she comments: “[B]eing with Frances is sometimes like walking through thorny bushes to see what you can see. Lots of scratches, quite a bit of bleeding, but so worth it.” When Frances calls her “dozy,” Ana finds a way to justify the cruel remark. “[I]t was a kind of nickname, and you only give nicknames to friends. And anyways, I believed I was dozy, and because of that I was pleased that she would be friends with me.”

Frances continues to taunt and insult Ana, demeaning her in order to gain advantage in the schoolyard pecking order. The behaviour escalates, and Frances eventually leads Ana into a horrendous sexual assault by some older boys that results in the death of another child. Thompson describes Ana’s moment-to-moment experiences through the prolonged attack, as well as the sociopathic behaviour of the perpetrators. Stretched out over the first eighty-odd pages of the book, the scene is interspersed with observations of Ana’s life as a “faculty brat” at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in the mid-1960s. For me, the structure disrupted any possible dramatic tension and made the encounter between the girls and their assailants all the more excruciating to read. Rightfully so.

By interweaving the events with their context, Thompson demonstrates how the assault is entwined with the violence that is normalized in these children’s lives. The act that can readily be labelled “criminal” arises from the environment in which it takes place. Kids are routinely mean to each other. Parents hit them regularly, entrust them to the care of bullies and fail to notice when they’re in distress.
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Told entirely in a child’s voice, the book finds a way to remark on these conditions while also showing how they are taken for granted. Ana’s parents attend faculty parties with artists and writers, as well as philosophers, including Hannah Arendt (who spent time as a fellow at Wesleyan University in the sixties). Ana’s father explains Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil in simplified terms: “Hannah Arendt decided that [Adolf] Eichmann was not a devil, but just an ordinary person you wouldn’t even notice …The way my dad explained it is that [evil people] are just like a small part of an engine. Something the engine needs to work properly. And, he said, ‘More importantly, any one of us could have been Adolf Eichmann, given the right circumstances.’” 

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After the assault and its lethal aftermath, the story jumps ahead to 1967, Canada’s centennial year, when Ana and her family move to Kingston, Ontario. Ana has some ups and downs growing into her teens, but violence of one kind or another remains a constant. As a person who lives with epilepsy, and as a teenager with visible acne, she is marked for it. Thomson depicts the high school power dynamics that enable the bullying, and shows how those dynamics shape Ana’s worldview and behaviour. She does her best to rise on the social ladder, and undervalues anyone who is nice to her.

Though observant and candid, Ana does not see the big picture. The reader has opportunities to connect Ana’s experiences with her environment, but she herself does not make those connections. She never stops blaming herself for allowing the assault and its aftermath. This is a world without trauma theory, without terms like “freeze” and “fawn” which might help Ana understand her own reactions during the attack. Eventually, she takes dramatic action, but her transformation is a personal one. We see no change – not even a moment of revelation – in Ana’s family system, in her friend group, in her community, or in society as a whole.
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I found this aspect of the book almost unbearably bleak; nonetheless, I respect Thompson’s choices. Has anything changed? Clearly not enough. We may have some new vocabulary, some better ways of coping with the consequences, but the problems portrayed in the book are still pressing today. Women and girls with disabilities are victims of violent crimes and sexual assault at approximately twice the rate of their non-disabled counterparts. There are people – a lot of them – who prey on those who have trouble defending themselves, or getting away. They do it because they can, and they can because other people look away, or even help. Victims are still blamed, and they still blame themselves.

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Reading In Crow’s Field, particularly the early scenes, I thought a lot about the generation theory that seems to crop up everywhere these days, and which (perhaps as a typical boomer) I wish would go away. (As far as I’m concerned, all this talk of when people were born leaches energy from more important distinctions, like race and class.) Still, I couldn’t help asking myself: Is this a book for boomers? Certainly, it is replete with cultural references from the sixties and seventies, but if this is a book for boomers, it is by no means a nostalgic one, and that’s a good thing.

In Crow’s Field portrays a group of white, middle-class North American children who grow up in the shadow of World War Two. Spankings and whacks upside-the-head are presented as nothing in comparison to their parents’ wartime traumas. Parents allow their children to wander unsupervised in deserted spaces, and don’t intervene when they are being bullied. The weird combination of sexual licence, leftover Victorian prudery and an obsession with appearances saddles the children with toxic mixed messages. Then there is the latitude given to “geniuses” in the intellectual and artistic circles they frequent, the frustration of a smart mother whose life is constrained to the home, and ALL THAT SMOKE the children breathe in because they don’t have a choice. I don’t mean: “poor boomers.” (Honest, I don’t!) I mean: younger readers, the world of this book is credible. It’s the way things were for many children in those days. If anyone preaches to you about the “resiliency” of boomers, who were allowed to roam freely, hand them In Crow’s Field.
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I also asked myself: What must Gen-Z readers think of this book? The cultural markers are different, but the bullying continues, except that it has gained a whole new dimension now with the advent of cell phones and social media. The references in Thompson’s book are familiar to me, and in that sense, I feel equipped to review it, but I would be interested to know how it goes over with younger readers. Was their grandparents’ bullying of a different order entirely, or was it just an earlier incarnation of the one so many young people endure today?

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​Maria Meindl is the author of a memoir, Outside the Box, a novel, The Work, and many short fiction and non-fiction pieces, including in The Temz Review. In 2005, she founded the Draft Reading Series, which is still going strong after 20 years. She teaches Feldenkrais movement classes, and runs a webinar series called The Work, Straight Talk on Craft and Method, about the history of wellness, fitness and performer-training methods.