49 pages • 1 hour read
Jessica JohnsBad Cree
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning This section includes depictions of anti-Indigenous racism and substance abuse.
Mackenzie wakes up from a disturbing nightmare. She smells pine and blood and looks down to find that she is holding a severed crow’s head in her hands. This is the third time in the last three weeks that Mackenzie has had this dream and the third time she’s woken up holding the dead bird’s head. She searches the rest of her bedroom. The crow’s head mysteriously vanishes. In the dream, Mackenzie wakes to find herself alone wearing thin pajamas in a cold, snowy forest. The wind begins to whip the trees into a frenzy, and she hears a shriek coming from a nearby trailhead. This time in the dream, she follows the trail to a clearing. There, an entire murder of crows is eating her sister, Sabrina. Sabrina looks like she’s been dead for quite some time, and there is a large hole beneath her collarbone. Through the hole, Sabrina’s heart beats. Mackenzie grabs the crow, snaps its neck, and wakes to find herself back in bed.
She showers and looks out the window. There is, as there has been for weeks, an unusually large number of crows sitting outside on the fence. She thinks the crows have begun to follow her. After Mackenzie showers, she heads to Whole Foods to see her friend, Joli. Joli’s mother, Dianne, knows Mackenzie’s mother, and Mackenzie is grateful for Joli’s and Dianne’s friendship. Three years ago, she moved from her small community to Vancouver, and without them, she would be utterly alone. She tells Joli about the dream, and Joli encourages her to call her mother or someone else who might be able to interpret it. Mackenzie calls her aunt, Doreen, who tells her that she finds the dream worrisome. Mackenzie’s sister, Sabrina, died nearly a year ago. Mackenzie is sure that the dream isn’t unresolved trauma: The crow’s head, she is sure, was real.
Chapter 2 Summary
Crows continue to follow Mackenzie around. Their presence makes her nervous because she knows that they gather not only to mourn their dead (the crow she killed in her dream) but to exact revenge on whoever killed one of their group. Mackenzie tries to shake her anxiety and heads to work at Whole Foods. There, she stands at her till and moves mechanically, thinking back to her childhood. She recalls the time when she and her sisters, Sabrina and Tracey, all had nightmares that rats were eating Sabrina. Sabrina became ill and had to be hospitalized. The doctor said it was an allergic reaction, but her parents got the girls a dreamcatcher. Mackenzie reflects that her recent dreams are different from her childhood nightmares, but she is sure that both kinds of night terrors are warnings.
After work, Mackenzie doesn’t feel well and returns home. She makes tea and begins scrolling through old family photos on her phone. Her older sisters, twins, had a different father, although Mackenzie’s father raised all three girls. He was a loving presence and showed them that real parents did not need to be related by blood to their children. Mackenzie recalls her first memory: spending time at “the lake” with her family. She was nine, the twins were 11, and their cousin Kassidy was eight. They went for a long walk with their grandmother in the woods near their campsite, and she felt the presence of her deceased grandfather. She was scared, but her grandmother explained that he was just warning them that a storm was coming. They’d made it back to camp just before the thunder began. In an old photo, Mackenzie notices a small wound on Sabrina’s collarbone, and she is suddenly sure that the woods from the lake are also the woods in her dream.
Chapter 3 Summary
Mackenzie sleeps fitfully that night. She thinks about her grandmother. She was diagnosed with liver cancer a while back and spent her final year living with Mackenzie and her parents. Not long after she died, Mackenzie left for Vancouver. She still feels connected to her grandmother and misses her. The next morning, she wakes to the noise of crow wings beating outside and decides to stay home. Mackenzie researches crows and contemplates her dreams. She wonders if they are not a warning but a signal of some unknown, inner power. She calls her mother, who is still upset with her for not coming home for Sabrina’s funeral last year. She tells her about the dreams, and her mother suggests she see a grief counselor. She stays home from work a second day, making a mess in her house and watching films on her computer. She thinks that she hears her grandmother in her house, shaking a metal tin full of coins that she once used during family poker games.
Chapter 4 Summary
Mackenzie wakes the next morning and takes a walk down to the beach to clear her head. On the way, her cousin Kassidy calls. Kassidy heard from her mother, Doreen, about Mackenzie’s unsettling dream, and she tells Mackenzie that she too has troubling dreams. Hers, though, predict the future. Mackenzie is stunned, but she is also happy that Kassidy and Doreen believe that she hasn’t “made up” her dream. Mackenzie shares that crows are now following her, and Kassidy expresses further concern. She encourages Mackenzie to return home, but Mackenzie is unsure. After she and Kassidy say their goodbyes, she keeps walking, thinking back to her childhood with Kassidy and her sisters. She is shaken from her contemplation by a noise overhead. She looks up to see a crow drop something down at her. At first, she thinks that it is a dead crow, and she is terrified. Upon further inspection, however, she realizes it is just a watermelon rind. Crows, she knows, give gifts to their “kin.” Could this be a good omen?
Mackenzie falls asleep outside and dreams of her sister. The three girls are together at their family’s campsite, and the twins want to go to a party. Mackenzie is unsure. The dream girls walk away, headed toward the gravel pits where teens throw clandestine, late-night parties. Mackenzie watches. Eventually, the air around her fills with snow. She sees another Sabrina, in addition to Sabrina walking with Tracey and dream Mackenzie. This Sabrina looks dead. Her skin is ashen, and her hair is tangled and grey. She is standing on a frozen lake with blood streaming from her mouth. She begins to stamp her foot, cracking the ice. Mackenzie screams for her to stop, but she does not. The ice cracks. Mackenzie wakes outside and vomits fresh lake water.
Chapter 5 Summary
Mackenzie walks home, feeling ill. Her phone is soaked, and she puts it into a bowl of rice to drain the water. She falls asleep and wakes later to Joli at the door. Joli is concerned because Mackenzie shares her location with Joli on their phones, and according to Mackenzie’s phone, she is at a lake in Alberta (the lake from her dream). Mackenzie is shaken and tells Joli about the dream and the vomiting. Joli warns her to be careful who she tells about her dreams. She notes how little regard white society has for Indigenous ways and wisdom and cautions Mackenzie not to end up in a psych ward. She asks Mackenzie about the events of the dream, and although Mackenzie knows that the dream depicted a real night from her memory, she cannot put any details about it together. Joli tells her that the two must work toward returning some normalcy to Mackenzie’s life. Joli cooks a meal for them, and they eat. Later, Mackenzie’s phone dries out. She receives text messages from an unknown number. The sender claims to be Sabrina.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Johns introduces Mackenzie’s character through the framework of grief and loss, her troubling nightmares, and her self-imposed isolation in Vancouver. The novel’s very first scene depicts Mackenzie’s dream about her recently deceased sister, and she wakes from it to find herself holding a severed crow’s head. It is evident that Sabrina’s death impacted Mackenzie deeply, and those around her initially interpreted her dreams as a manifestation of her melancholy. Mackenzie, however, is not convinced. She tells her friend, “This isn’t some unresolved trauma shit. This is something else. I woke up with a dead crow in my hands” (11). Although Mackenzie’s unwillingness to face her grief is a key part of her characterization at this early point in the narrative, she is partially correct about her dreams. One of this novel’s initial uses of suspense and foreshadowing is the slippery, shifting meaning of several of its key symbols and motifs: Mackenzie’s dreams do seem to be the result of “unresolved trauma,” but the narrative ultimately reveals them as something far more sinister.
However, Processing Grief and Loss to Overcome Isolation is one of the novel’s primary themes, and it is important even in these early chapters. Mackenzie recounts both the loss of her grandmother and her sister and fills in details about her relationship with each family member. It is already apparent that her family is close-knit, and from the stories that Mackenzie tells about life with her grandmother, it is obvious that she was as important to Mackenzie as her mother. The Affirming Power of Family and Community is another of the novel’s key themes, and Mackenzie’s various flashbacks and ruminations demonstrate how profoundly her family shaped her identity, both familial and cultural. After Mackenzie flees her childhood home in High Prairie, she lives a relatively isolated life in Vancouver. She does, however, find belonging in the city in the form of close relationships with her mother’s friend, Dianne, and Dianne’s child, Joli, with whom Mackenzie works as a cashier at Whole Foods. Dianne and Joli become Mackenzie’s surrogate family, illustrating how Johns underscores that kinship exists beyond one’s immediate, biological family, especially for the novel’s Indigenous characters.
An exploration of race and Indigenous experiences underpin much of the narrative, and Mackenzie recounts various moments of prejudice as she moves within a society that is majority white. She is aware of the way that white Canadians treat Indigenous people and how her light skin privileges her, even as a “minority” in Canadian society. She observes that because of her “light skin,” she is “treated better everywhere” than her sisters (24), who have a different father than Mackenzie and darker skin as a result. Race will continue to play a role in the way that Indigenous characters are treated throughout the narrative. Here, it serves as an important moment of engagement with the lived experiences of Indigenous people, and it connects the novel to other works of Indigenous literature that explore themes related to race and racism.
Crows are one of the novel’s key symbols, and they emerge early in the narrative as a focal point for Mackenzie. At this point, she finds their presence sinister, and their constant circling above her as she walks to and from work heightens her already-increasing anxiety. Although the text will ultimately reveal that the crows are a benign force in Mackenzie’s life, their eerie presence in Vancouver and the severed head that Mackenzie wakes holding after one of her nightmares are one of the novel’s first uses of horror tropes to explore its themes.
Dreams, another of the novel’s key symbols and motifs, also emerge as important in this first set of chapters. Not only does the novel begin with Mackenzie’s nightmare, but Mackenzie also learns that her cousin, Kassidy, experiences strange, prophetic dreams. This is another way that the novel engages with the theme of The Affirming Power of Family and Community. Mackenzie has chosen to isolate herself hundreds of miles from her childhood home and mostly cut off communication with her family. Her cousin’s admission that she too has troubling and meaningful dreams re-establishes this connection: Mackenzie feels a sense of kinship that not only ties her back to her family but also provides her some respite. She is not, as she worried, “crazy,” as her cousin validates for her. This connection foreshadows the role that dreams play in Mackenzie’s family and establishes these dreams as a shared familial trait that deepens Mackenzie’s bond with the women in her familial network.
