Mattie Collins, age eighteen, marries her third husband, a forty-year-old man she mistakenly believes she knows. When his mind-games begin, this spirited young woman rises to the challenge. Soon faced with the worst tragedy imaginable, she makes a decision that changes her life forever. "Madelon Phillips' Beneath the Shadow of Crows is an astounding feat of storytelling. Just as Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn are not only gripping stories, but emblematic of their times, so it is with Beneath the Shadow of Crows. It is the story of Mattie Collins, who comes of age in the fifties, a woman of her time and place, brought up by her father to think of herself as, well, worthless. She marries to escape the war zone of her parents' home. It is a story of a woman's struggle to find her self-worth and freedom from the mental prison built brick by brick first by her father and then completed by her husband. It's a heartwarming story of personal triumph in an age when for women the barriers were a mile high and the cultural landscape littered with land mines. Beneath the Shadow of Crows is one you won't soon forget." ----James N. Frey How to Write a Damned Good Novel "Sit down, open up Beneath the Shadow of the Crows and call in food so you can keep reading Madelon Phillips' debut novel until the very last page. That's what I did, and I'll never forget Mattie Collins, her wit and her spirit. Mattie is snappy, intelligent, full of heart and her perspective on life kept a big smile on my face. In Beneath the Shadow of the Crows Madelon Phillips deftly creates the story of Mattie's life and peoples it with characters that breathe." ----Tina Welling,Cowboys Never Cry