Institutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest where she would run for safety and, of course, the giant talking green crow who appeared when she most needed him. The green crow is a conceited, boisterous creature who follows the novel's nameless protagonist throughout her life, until the day that its presence begins to embarrass her. Confined to a tedious domestic life, she is desperate to hide the crow's existence. Failing to do so, she winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Can she repress and renounce her acerbic, sharp-beaked daemon--or learn to love herself, bird and all?