I should have been worried about the crane.
Our unnamed protagonist is fifteen when the crane arrives but they were parentified long before. Her mother, so entrenched in trauma generations in the making, doesn’t have the capacity to be there in a meaningful way for her children. It’s up to our fifteen year old to parent her younger brother, Michael, as well as herself.
This novella is a retelling of The Crane Wife and I still don’t know what to do with this story a week after I finished reading it.
It’s haunting and horrifying. It tackles domestic violence, which is ugly, no matter what form it takes.
There was no one to tell. So I told no one.
In the hands of Kelly Barnhill, though, even disturbing stories like this one contain beauty and that, my friend, is what cognitive dissonance is made of.
It’s the daughter doing everything in her power to protect her brother. It’s how she resists the violence that has invaded her home. But it’s also the way the author creates with words, so it feels like they’re dancing around me.
It’s fitting that the teller of this story doesn’t have a name. Women in her family are the subject of gossip and rumours but they don’t have identities outside of their roles: mother, artist, daughter, sister.
Her brother has a name. The sheep have names. The women do not.
I knew when I read When Women Were Dragons that I’d found a new favourite author. This book confirmed it while reminding me that I still need to read everything else Kelly Barnhill has ever written. I need those stories in my heart, even if they hurt.
Once Upon a Blurb
“Mothers fly away like migrating birds. This is why farmers have daughters.”
A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mum, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them — her mum has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed.
Yet when her mum brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mum letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mum abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.
In this stunning contemporary retelling of “The Crane Wife” by the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one fiercely pragmatic teen forced to grow up faster than was fair will do whatever it takes to protect her family — and change the story.
Schizanthus Nerd 