A Pocketful of Crows: A modern fairytale novella from the Sunday Times top-ten bestselling author

by Joanne Harris

Overview

I am as brown as brown can be,
And my eyes as black as sloe;
I am as brisk as brisk can be,
And wild as forest doe.
(The Child Ballads, 295)

So begins a beautiful tale of love, loss and revenge. Following the seasons, A Pocketful of Crows balances youth and age, wisdom and passion and draws on nature and folklore to weave a stunning modern mythology around a nameless wild girl.

Only love could draw her into the world of named, tamed things. And it seems only revenge will be powerful enough to let her escape.

Beautifully illustrated by Bonnie Helen Hawkins, this is a stunning and original modern fairytale.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473222205
Publisher:	Orion
Publication date:	10/19/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

JOANNE HARRIS is an Anglo-French author, whose books include twenty novels, three cookbooks, and many short stories. Her work is extremely diverse, covering aspects of magic realism, suspense, historical fiction, mythology, and fantasy. In 2000, her 1999 novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by the Queen.

Editorial Reviews

10/15/2018
This story centers on a young, wild, nameless girl who understood freedom like no other. Some called her a witch, others saw her as one of the traveling folk, who ride along with wild animals and view the world through their eyes. Watching one of the village girls place a love token by the fairy tree, she begins a quest that will take her away from everything she knows, finding love and taking a name but losing much more. As the seasons progress and she discovers she must escape the world that has bound her, she learns that passion is reserved not only for love but also for revenge. VERDICT Harris (Chocolat) beautifully weaves folklore and inspiration from the Child Ballads into a longer story with vivid prose, lush settings, and characters who win your heart. Will appeal to fans of Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" series.—Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Library Journal

07/30/2018
This short novel spins a pretty fairy tale, winding through the seasons from bright to dark over the bones of British folklore and song. A carefree “bonny brown girl” of the “travelling folk,” who borrow the bodies of woodland creatures, trades her freedom for a name and the thrill of the love of a wealthy young man. But when he betrays her for a fair village maid, she takes counsel with the elder wisdom of the forest and seeks her revenge as the only way to return to her former carefree ways. Harris (The Testament of Loki) balances her protagonist’s roles as an archetype and as an individual, telling a moving story of the loss of innocence through reference-laden prose in a mythic mode, full of charms and magic. Hawkins’s sweet, crow-filled pen-and-ink illustrations exude a gentle wildness and suggest that the character’s brownness is about race as well as the class distinction implied by the ballad that gives the story its plot. Harris closes the piece with witchy optimism about the cycles of life, making this a cozy flight of fancy to curl up with on a chilly night. Agent: Peter Robinson, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.). (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"a cozy flight of fancy to curl up with on a chilly night"—Publishers Weekly


This is a beautiful package with lovely illustrations. This book is sure to please readers who love fables and folktales, as well as magic and fantasy. It also would be a great companion piece to early colonial American lit as I found myself thinking of THE CRUCIBLE and other works about the American wilds and the magic that once lived here.
—Jamie Southern, Bookseller,

From the Publisher