November 14, 2022
With this grim, grown-up fairy tale, Newbery Medalist Barnhill (The Girl Who Drank the Moon) delivers a dark and engrossing response to the folk tale of the Crane Wife. When the unnamed narrator’s flighty, artistic mother brings home a crane as the latest in a long line of abusive lovers, the narrator, a 15-year-old girl, believes this will be another fly-by-night romance. However, the crane is there to stay. He moves in, filling the house with feathers, terrifying the narrator’s six-year-old brother, Michael, and cutting the mother with his caresses. As the mother becomes too absorbed in her crane-inspired (and crane-demanded) artwork to care for her children, a social worker circles and the narrator decides to take matters into her own hands. In bleak but beautiful prose, Barnhill maintains the original fable’s examination of female exploitation at the hands of male partners and the limits of self-sacrifice, while also touching on more contemporary themes like drone surveillance and the commodification of art. The depiction of the perpetual cycle of abuse may be too depressing for some, but fans of dark, surreal fantasy will be enthralled.