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When the Crow Sings Jacqueline Wales 9780979859809 Books

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When the Crow Sings Jacqueline Wales 9780979859809 Books

It has been a few years now since I've read this book. It is however still etched in my mind, as if I had just put it down yesterday. Jacqueline Wales, weaves a mesmerizing tale about a long chain of women, linked together by poor decisions and their inescapable consequences through the generations in a single Scottish family.

Generation after generation, these women are caught in the misery and despair they inherited from their mothers and their immediate social environment. Destined to face the same situations, reacting in the same fashion and ultimately facing the same consequences. These women live an infernal catch 22, as if the destiny of all the women in that family was predetermined to end tragically. Their life is a speeding runaway freight train on its way to the end of the line and the cliff beyond, on full power, without any brakes, or engineer at the helm, prisoner of unyielding rails hurling it towards destruction. A grim ending of a succession of miserable lives, marred by heartache, abject poverty, moral misery and cold absence of Love. A downward spiral that seems to go on for ever until one of them battles her way out of that nightmarish existence, by sheer will power and brute physical force. The comeliness of that woman is the blessing in disguise that allows her to break free and ultimately find peace, love and a chance at a normal existence...

She is not however, the heroine of the Novel. Her strength and compassion for her sister, and ultimately her niece, were the grains of sand that started the breaking down of the "Machina Infernale" on which the women in her family were riding powerlessly to their doom, one after the other. Her compassion fanned the flames of the rebel spirit and the courage of her niece who was already well down the road to perdition on which her ancestors had walked before her. Her niece found the courage to break the cycle and finally get her own chance at happiness, out of ignorance and out of misery. It took an extreme act of courage and an agonizingly painful sacrifice. One that would haunt her for the rest of her life, but she did it, not so much for herself, but for all the future generation of women in her family. She reversed singlehandedly the tide of misery for the posterity of the women that will come after her in her family. She did it for the only reason worth such a sacrifice in her eyes, for what she never knew herself from her own mother. She did it for love.

Historically factual, When The Crows Sings, opens a window in the privacy of the blue collar urban society of Scotland. A Northern European country, which is by all standards, an industrialized, developed nation. A country united with Wales and England under the Banner of the United Kingdom, not a sub-Saharan Country in the African Continent, not a nation of the Indian Peninsula or even in Latin America. The story begins in the early 20th century and ends nowadays. The shock comes from the scenery you glimpse through that window. The living conditions, the ignorance, the despair could have been plucked right out of a Novel of Emile Zola about the life of the working class in the 19th century Industrial Revolution in Europe. Never could I have imagined such absence of hope, such despair and deep poverty in Northern Europe in the 20th century, my century. The characters are my contemporaries, yet it could describe the state of mind of the inhabitants of the slums of Calcutta in India, or those of the Favelas of Rio De Janeiro.

Jacqueline Wales, uses her incredible talent to capture and to violently throw the reader in the midst of the characters. She teaches us not just the vernacular but the actual dialect of the Scottish common folks. There are moments of passion, joy and other powerful emotions. But be warned, this book will grab your full attention from the very first page and until the very end of the last page. It will leave you panting with emotional exhaustion trying to catch your breath. Your mind will be reeling for weeks after you've read the very last words on the very last page. A surprise at every turn, a tense story, wonderfully told, raw with precision and clarity, mind gripping and heart wrenching. This book is read by many women, but was written for everyone. I am as macho as a man comes, without the misogyny, but it still wrung my gut at every other page. I started reading it in the plane on my way from Miami to New York,on a business trip. I only put it down long enough to get into the cab and check in my Hotel. I skipped, unpacking, showering, dinner and read all night non stop till it was time for me to get ready for my first meeting in the morning. I went to the meeting with the book's omnipresence in the back of my mind, strangely focused in spite of the lack of sleep, but invigorated by the realization that the Strength of the Human Spirit knows no bounds. If an itty bitty little girl could surmount so much adversity with so much courage, against all odds and turn her life around in such a grand way, then there definitely is hope for Mankind. My meeting went extremely well. I felt strangely serene during the entire time, knowing that no matter how bad things seem, there is always a way to turn it around, no matter how seemingly impossible.

No matter what I just wrote about this book, you will be surprised by what you will read, you will be hypnotized and unless you are from Scotland and know firsthand what the book describes, you will not think of Scotland the same way again, at least not the Urban Scotland you imagine.You will talk about it to everyone you know and for years to come. Prepare yourself to be stunned.


Tags : When the Crow Sings [Jacqueline Wales] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Abandoned children, tattered dreams, silent survivors... Questions too dangerous to ask...answers too shameful to voice... One proud Scottish woman crosses the ocean carrying a manuscript that holds her family s only hope for redemption. Three generations of women share a heritage entangled with secrets and unspoken sorrow. The unlikely parcel on Agnes lap is the fearless telling of their story that will finally bring redemption to this tragic legacy.,Jacqueline Wales,When the Crow Sings,Pantulan Press,0979859808,56742802235,Family Life,General,Romance - Suspense,Literature & Fiction Genre Fiction,Fiction,Fiction - Historical,Fiction Family Life,Fiction General,Fiction Romance Suspense,Historical - General,Sagas

When the Crow Sings Jacqueline Wales 9780979859809 Books Reviews

This is a book that draws you in, won't let you go, and stays with you when you finish. It is a long time since a book made me cry, but this one did. It also cost me several nights of sleep.
The characters are well drawn and complex, especially in the case of the girls and women, and the story line, engrossing. While set in Scotland, the story is a universal one, as in the case of all great books. For those who have never been poor, is a whole new world. For those of us who have experienced poverty and struggled out of its clutches, we identify with the women in the book, knowing that even in the middle of suffering, there can be pride and dreams. Ultimately, it is strength of character and belief in yourself that will get you through. Jacqueline Wales is a great story teller.
When the crow sings is definitely movie material.
The story opens in the early years of the twentieth century in Scotland, with a woman working in a rope factory. We see episodes of her life and those of several generations of her descendants, focusing mostly on the women. The family for the most part lives in extreme poverty, with little education to offer hope beyond mere survival. The women are constantly stalked by the disaster of pregnancy, imprisoned by the demands of children and the men in their lives. They are at the mercy of forces far beyond their world—war, peace, shifts in the economy batter them without their having any say in what comes their way. In their desperation, they make foolish, self-destructive decisions, generation after generation. The story is one of largely unremitting misery, but even though I’m not ordinarily a fan of angst, I found myself absorbed almost hypnotically by this book, unable to put it down or out of my thoughts for long.

The unhappy saga laid out in these pages alternates with brief moments set at the turn of the twenty-first century. One of the characters in the main tale, Agnes, is on a plane headed for Los Angeles. She is reading the manuscript version of the book unfolding before us and reflecting on it. Through these vignettes we gradually come to understand the context of the story the book has been written for a daughter given up for adoption as an infant, to explain her biological family’s history.

I think tales that go back and forth in time often don’t need to do so; the clues embedded in the present-day text aren’t all that necessary, and the reader wants to mine the secondary text for ways to anticipate events in the primary one, leading to an erosion of suspense. Also, it’s harder for the reader to lose herself when she keeps being bumped out of the main thread of the plot—the focus turns to the writer’s art itself and, in the process, undermines that very art. It’s not clear to me that this story had to be told in that way, and at the very end of the novel it made understanding difficult for me because I had forgotten a relevant fact that was presented right at the beginning.

So this takes me back to why I was so riveted by this book. Part of it must be the author’s gift for imagery—her metaphors are simultaneously surprising and right on target—and the strong rhythmic pulse of her prose. Right from the start, I was drawn in by the vivid economy of the writing
“Inside the factory, acrid stickiness mauls the nose, and voices yell above the din of grinding machines spitting out thick cords of black, tarred rope. A woman, stooped and gray beyond the tell of her age, pulls hand over hand, coiling the rope in a mounting pile at her feet. Ignoring the fine hemp pricks from the loose weave, which leave her hands chapped red and bleeding, and the charred smell of cooling tar on her palms, she throttles a sob, thinking of her daughter ‘cast out with the whores of Babylon,’ and continues to pull the rope roughly through her tortured hands.”

This is a writer I want to take a journey with! Even while my cozy-reading impulses were continually frustrated, I was so deep in the world she evoked that it was hard to climb out. I was also attracted by the strength of the women, though often frustrated by the ways they made life harder than necessary for themselves. There’s a stubborn cleaving to life, even when life seems unsustainable, which is uplifting in its way. I can’t help wishing that in the future the author will apply her manifest gifts to a story with a higher proportion of light to darkness, but I deeply respect what she has done.

The book was a gift from the author to my writer’s group, but I was under no obligation to read or review.
It has been a few years now since I've read this book. It is however still etched in my mind, as if I had just put it down yesterday. Jacqueline Wales, weaves a mesmerizing tale about a long chain of women, linked together by poor decisions and their inescapable consequences through the generations in a single Scottish family.

Generation after generation, these women are caught in the misery and despair they inherited from their mothers and their immediate social environment. Destined to face the same situations, reacting in the same fashion and ultimately facing the same consequences. These women live an infernal catch 22, as if the destiny of all the women in that family was predetermined to end tragically. Their life is a speeding runaway freight train on its way to the end of the line and the cliff beyond, on full power, without any brakes, or engineer at the helm, prisoner of unyielding rails hurling it towards destruction. A grim ending of a succession of miserable lives, marred by heartache, abject poverty, moral misery and cold absence of Love. A downward spiral that seems to go on for ever until one of them battles her way out of that nightmarish existence, by sheer will power and brute physical force. The comeliness of that woman is the blessing in disguise that allows her to break free and ultimately find peace, love and a chance at a normal existence...

She is not however, the heroine of the Novel. Her strength and compassion for her sister, and ultimately her niece, were the grains of sand that started the breaking down of the "Machina Infernale" on which the women in her family were riding powerlessly to their doom, one after the other. Her compassion fanned the flames of the rebel spirit and the courage of her niece who was already well down the road to perdition on which her ancestors had walked before her. Her niece found the courage to break the cycle and finally get her own chance at happiness, out of ignorance and out of misery. It took an extreme act of courage and an agonizingly painful sacrifice. One that would haunt her for the rest of her life, but she did it, not so much for herself, but for all the future generation of women in her family. She reversed singlehandedly the tide of misery for the posterity of the women that will come after her in her family. She did it for the only reason worth such a sacrifice in her eyes, for what she never knew herself from her own mother. She did it for love.

Historically factual, When The Crows Sings, opens a window in the privacy of the blue collar urban society of Scotland. A Northern European country, which is by all standards, an industrialized, developed nation. A country united with Wales and England under the Banner of the United Kingdom, not a sub-Saharan Country in the African Continent, not a nation of the Indian Peninsula or even in Latin America. The story begins in the early 20th century and ends nowadays. The shock comes from the scenery you glimpse through that window. The living conditions, the ignorance, the despair could have been plucked right out of a Novel of Emile Zola about the life of the working class in the 19th century Industrial Revolution in Europe. Never could I have imagined such absence of hope, such despair and deep poverty in Northern Europe in the 20th century, my century. The characters are my contemporaries, yet it could describe the state of mind of the inhabitants of the slums of Calcutta in India, or those of the Favelas of Rio De Janeiro.

Jacqueline Wales, uses her incredible talent to capture and to violently throw the reader in the midst of the characters. She teaches us not just the vernacular but the actual dialect of the Scottish common folks. There are moments of passion, joy and other powerful emotions. But be warned, this book will grab your full attention from the very first page and until the very end of the last page. It will leave you panting with emotional exhaustion trying to catch your breath. Your mind will be reeling for weeks after you've read the very last words on the very last page. A surprise at every turn, a tense story, wonderfully told, raw with precision and clarity, mind gripping and heart wrenching. This book is read by many women, but was written for everyone. I am as macho as a man comes, without the misogyny, but it still wrung my gut at every other page. I started reading it in the plane on my way from Miami to New York,on a business trip. I only put it down long enough to get into the cab and check in my Hotel. I skipped, unpacking, showering, dinner and read all night non stop till it was time for me to get ready for my first meeting in the morning. I went to the meeting with the book's omnipresence in the back of my mind, strangely focused in spite of the lack of sleep, but invigorated by the realization that the Strength of the Human Spirit knows no bounds. If an itty bitty little girl could surmount so much adversity with so much courage, against all odds and turn her life around in such a grand way, then there definitely is hope for Mankind. My meeting went extremely well. I felt strangely serene during the entire time, knowing that no matter how bad things seem, there is always a way to turn it around, no matter how seemingly impossible.

No matter what I just wrote about this book, you will be surprised by what you will read, you will be hypnotized and unless you are from Scotland and know firsthand what the book describes, you will not think of Scotland the same way again, at least not the Urban Scotland you imagine.You will talk about it to everyone you know and for years to come. Prepare yourself to be stunned.