Crows Over a Wheatfield - Hardcover

Sharp, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786861177 ISBN 13: 9780786861170

Publisher: Hyperion, 1996

Synopsis

Judge Melanie Klonecki, herself the daughter of an abusive father, becomes involved--personally and professionally--with Mildred Steck, a woman who kidnaps her child to protect him from his father and who unwittingly launches a crusade for women trapped in abusive relationships.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Sharp is the author of The Woman Who Was Not All There, The Imposter, and Lost in Jersey City, and a translator of Latin American fiction, including Antonio Skármeta's novel The Insurrection. Her books have won her the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voice Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Award. A graduate of Columbia Law School, she practices criminal law in New York.

From the Back Cover

Spanning a course of thirty years, Crows over a Wheatfield is the story of Melanie Ratleer, a judge who is approaching the summit of her career with an anguished awareness that she has long since abandoned herself to the comforting impersonality of her work. Melanie has come to the law under the massive shadow of her father, a brilliant and notorious litigator as despotic at home as he is in the courtroom. His young wife, daughter, and especially his son have suffered under his unpredictable and merciless rages, which culminate in a tragedy that tears the family apart and sends its members away in flight to their own safe havens. Years afterward Melanie pays a visit to the small Wisconsin town where her stepmother and brother have settled and grown close to a colorfully unorthodox minister and his daughter, the flamboyant and provocative Mildred Steck. The young women quickly become friends, but as the summer passes, Melanie gradually learns that Mildred's family life is beset by its own brutality, which only another tragedy can bring to an end. After a decade in hiding Mildred becomes the focus of national attention when she organizes an underground movement on behalf of women and children fleeing unjust custody rulings and domestic violence. When the movement finally decides to take a public position on a notorious custody case, the drama that ensues forces Melanie to confront a test of her principles, as well as the many long-avoided ghosts of her past.

Reviews

Sharp's new novel about domestic violence may seem a radical departure from the warm, often ribald family stories found in her earlier books, Lost in Jersey City and The Woman Who Was Not All There. Her characters here are as splendidly realized as before, and rendered with insight and humor, as Sharp tackles this serious subject with the legal expertise gleaned from her career as a criminal attorney. She weaves a highly suspenseful, complicated plot paced with unflagging narrative momentum and enhanced with telling details. The story brings together two women?New York judge Melanie Ratleer and idealistic social activist Mildred Steck?who have endured domestic violence. Spanning a period of 40 years, the novel begins in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s, where Melanie, her stepmother and half-brother, Matt, live under the shadow of her father's tyranny. Joel Ratleer is a renowned criminal attorney, but he brutally abuses his family, especially Matt, until the boy has a mental breakdown. Eventually, Matt finds shelter at a halfway house established by Mildred's father. When it is discovered that Mildred's husband, Daniel, is torturing their young son, Mildred flees with the boy after a fatuous judge seems ready to award custody to the viciously mendacious Daniel. Still on the lam, Mildred begins an underground railroad to help other families victimized by violence and legal ineptitude. Communicating with Melanie via the Internet, she pulls her into another case involving a woman who has fled an abusive but socially powerful husband. The court scenes in this novel bristle with the interaction of the participants' personalities; they are riveting. From start to finish, this is an emotionally involving story whose powerful message is commensurate with the social problem it illustrates with gripping accuracy. Major ad/promo; Italian and Spanish rights sold; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Criminal lawyer and novelist Sharp (Lost in Jersey City, 1993, etc.) stakes out a political agenda in this tale of child abuse and two women who crusade against it. In her long and affecting opening scene, Sharp's narrator, Melanie Ratleer, describes a grim Wisconsin childhood in which her father, a brilliant trial lawyer, beat his young wife, Melanie's stepmother, and psychologically abuses both Melanie and her younger brother, Matt. Matt develops schizophrenia and must be committed, and Melanie is sent to be raised by her mother's people in Illinois. Much later, she becomes a lawyer herself and attempts to bury her past in endless work. It proves inescapable, though, and she eventually returns to Illinois to begin anew her relationship with her brother. Enter Mildred Steck, a friend of Matt's. Mildred's a latter-day free spirit who becomes even more radicalized when her political activist husband, Daniel, returns from Brazil and begins, suddenly, to abuse their three-year-old son, Ben. She and Daniel separate, but when a court awards custody of the boy to Daniel, Mildred kidnaps Ben, and in the process of aiding and abetting, … la Thelma and Louise, Melanie finds liberation from her lifelong repression. Mildred even founds an underground railroad for abused women, barricading herself, Waco-style, to fend off the FBI. ``There's a whole nation of women out there,'' she says, ``who live in terror, trapped and dependent, with and without children, and the law won't free them.'' A whole nation? The argument that Sharp advances is that when women flee from abuse, the courts seldom allow them custody, in part because they have fled and in part because men have more power. While her novel is well-paced and dramatic, Sharp relies frequently on stereotypes and presents no worthy men to counter her two abusers. This time out, the author has apparently decided to preach to the converted, offering not healing love or cool logic but ideology. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lawyer Melanie Ratleer stoically recounts her family story and its links to the domestic violence and child custody proceedings endured by her friend, Mildred Steck. Melanie's mother died when she was seven, and her tyrannical father soon remarried Ottilie, a young woman who gave birth to his son, Matt, seven years earlier. Melanie, Ottilie, and Matt sought refuge in each other's company and eventually escaped: Melanie to her mother's family and law school, Matt to psychosis, and Ottilie to another town. When Melanie returns years later, Ottilie and Matt are lovingly attached to Rev. John Steck, who runs the halfway house where Matt resides along with his daughter, Mildred, and her son, Ben. Sharp's (Lost in Jersey City, HarperCollins, 1993) story beguilingly turns to Mildred's heroism in the face of an abusive husband and a legal system that fails to protect women and children. A chilling tale, forthrightly told; highly recommended for all fiction collections.?Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A childhood spent trying to cope with a physically and emotionally abusing father has sensitized Melanie Klonecki to the devastation that domestic violence wreaks on its victims. Melanie, who has become a lawyer like her brilliant father, soon realizes that the law often fails those most in need of its protection. She is drawn into a personal and professional relationship with Mildred Steck, a woman whose husband, outwardly perfect, is dangerously violent. Steck takes the law into her own hands and develops an "underground railroad" to help women and children who are in similar circumstances. Sharp (Lost in Jersey City, 1993) fills this overlong, rather tedious novel with too many lightly sketched characters and unnecessary subplots. The author, an attorney herself, has strong (and justified) feelings about the failure of the legal system to help abused women. Noble sentiments may alert readers to society's social and legal inequities, but it takes a more talented writer than Sharp to turn them into a good novel. Still, readers looking for novels about domestic abuse might overlook the flaws to find support for their views. Nancy Pearl

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786861177
• ISBN 13: 9780786861170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416