The Way the Crow Flies

In 1960s rural Canada, eight-year-old Madeleine McCarthy is a high-spirited, precocious and empathetic girl who has recently moved with her parents and her brother, Mike, to Centralia, Ontario. Told from the perspective of Madeleine throughout much of the book, which initially starts as a coming-of-age tale, she recounts the sunny optimism of starting at a new school and her new house. Madeleine idolizes her older brother, sees her father as a hero, and quickly befriends classmates Auriel and Lisa. It is, however, gradually revealed that Madeleine is growing up directly through some of Canada's darker history, including anti-Indigenous racism, Cold War secrecy, her father Jack's quiet horror at the facilitation of a suspected Nazi scientist into Canada for research, her mother Mimi's cultural struggle as an Acadian, and a pedophile schoolteacher, Mr. March, who abuses Madeleine and some other female classmates. Madeleine acts out in regards to the molestation by severely injuring a tree, which she later sobs to Jack about, horrified that she hurt another living thing after having debarked the tree and soaped the windows of her school. She is drawn to Colleen, the mysterious daughter of a non-military family across the street, but is dissuaded from befriending her at first. An American family moves in with a young daughter Madeleine's age named Claire McCarroll, whom Madeleine befriends. Mimi befriends Karen Froelich, Colleen's mother.

Claire is discovered murdered and apparently sexually abused, not long after which Ricky Froelich, a Métis boy (and Colleen's brother), is arrested for. Madeleine begins to internalize the increasingly surreal and maddening nature of her community as she struggles to cope with her friend's death, and is deeply bothered by two other girls in her class, misfit Marjorie (a bossy and cold child who exhibits symptoms of a cluster B disorder), and Grace, a disabled girl who struggles with poor hygiene and is often taken advantage of by Marjorie. At one point, Madeleine spots Grace picking up a piece of desiccated dog poop that has hardened and turned white, trying to write with it as though it's a piece of chalk. Disillusioned by her own family and still traumatized by both Claire's murder and the abuse at the hands of Mr. March, she becomes close friends with Colleen and the girls become blood sisters. Jack becomes more anxious and distant while working with Simon, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and Colleen dreads the Compulsory sterilization in Canada targeting Indigenous and disabled Canadians, which render them unable to ever have biological children during periods of forced institutionalization.

The book later explores Madeleine's life as she grows older. Jack and Mimi remain married, but they grow apart; Jack spends much of his free time watching television, while Mimi buries herself in volunteer work. Mimi drifts apart from Madeleine when her daughter reveals that she's a lesbian. As Madeleine seeks therapy for her past, which does little to help her, she does begin to come to terms with her lesbian sexuality and her trauma, accepting herself as a person; she establishes a career, and becomes gradually estranged from the rest of her family. She reunites with Colleen, who is older and has faced her own trauma and lives with exonerated Ricky, isolated and reserved but nonetheless happy to reunite with her old friend. The book reveals in the end that Claire's killer was not Ricky at all, but actually Marjorie, who bullied Claire after school, lured her to an isolated area, removed her underwear and murdered her, while coercing Grace into helping her. Claire's murder remains officially unsolved. When Madeleine attempts to telephone Marjorie, who has a family and works as a nurse, Marjorie hangs up on her.