As 14-year-old-Katria watches her father, Ivan, step-by-step sweep his spray of poison brew back to front over the lawn, she imagines the little creatures beneath the fall of his steel- toed boots curling up dead the minute he passes. She imagines his poison percolating through the soil and travelling underground to his patch of rhubarb stalks that he stewed in pots and forced Moms to eat in large quantities to make her lose weight. Then, Katria can hardly believe the voice she hears coming from her mother's grave: "HE POISONED ME. GET EVEN."

After years of revolving-door foster care, one home to another, Owen and Martha are suddenly moved to a house in Toronto, where Sister Charlotte comes to take care of them. "When Sister Charlotte limped through the front door of our house, I shouldn't have been surprised. But I was. Her face was lined, her skin grey, and her hair dead and stringy, as though she belonged in a coffin. She didn't wear a nun's white head-cover; her plain blue dress with black socks and flat black shoes was the nun uniform for the Sisters of Sorrows."The first thing she said, before even being introduced, was 'What a relief. These stronger pills are a miracle. I'll be back in shape in no time.'" When Owen and Martha realize that the "pills" are being supplied by a mysterious Mr. Knight, and the house they are living in seems to be hidden within the Catholic system, they want to know why. Their investigations uncover multiple foster-care secrets, including the reason they are being hidden.

"Mr. Skibo, the piano tuner, opened his leather case. He took out a leaver and wrench and hammer. He plunked and listened and plunked. When he had finished he tidied away his tools. He turned on his tape recorder. "So this little girl has never had a piano lesson you say, or has never heard a piece of Chopin's music, but she can play everything Chopin wrote. So which Chopin is she going to play?""Aiyana can't answer that question," said the priest. "She simply plays what comes to her from Chopin on the other side.""Other side, Father? What other side?""She can't explain that. She believes she's two people. Aiyana and Chopin."Mr. Skibo hesitated. He scowled. Then he became thoughtful. "I think I've heard of that. Acausal parallelism, Father. When two people become connected independent of time and space.""And that is why, Mr. Skibo, I asked you to travel all the way up to this church basement in this remote northern community to record this child's astonishing gift and take it...

Salty Saltzmanous's life was pretty dull. After years of hopping from trailer park to trailer park with his family, he thought he would get a new start in a little house deep in Mennonite country; but all that's there to do is work, drink, and argue with his wife. He didn't think it could get much worse-until he accidentally killed her. So he ran. Now it's been fourteen years on the run, living with a lively cast of homeless outcasts in the big city, all of them on the run from their pasts, all of them looking for some kind of salvation. But the police are back on Salty's trail, and the key to the case is his daughter, Sylvia, abandoned to foster care and now fully grown, who has finally decided to track down her missing father... Warm, heartbreaking, and funny, The Eye of the Chicken is a modern-day drama of abandonment and redemption.