The Crane Husband
Ratings24
Average rating4.1
Award-winning author Kelly Barnhill brings her singular talents to The Crane Husband, a raw, powerful story of love, sacrifice, and family. “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 mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it’s been just the three of them—her mom has brought home guests at times, but none have ever stayed. Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom 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.
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This novella feels like something I would've liked to read in my high school AP Lit class or a lit class in college! There's so much to pull out of this story - symbols, motifs, themes - and so many ways to frame the characters and the relationships between the unnamed narrator, Michael, Mom, and Father. The narrator is wise beyond her years and that comes across clearly in this story. This is a quick bite that's unsettling and strange but stays with you - I haven't stopped thinking about it all day!
As always, I recommend reading the content warnings before picking this up.
Probably more of a 3.5 but I'm rounding up.
This is a retelling of the Japanese folktale The Crane Wife and while I couldn't fully recollect what it was about, it is mentioned in this novella too, so that was a good way to refresh my memory. While the original is about greed, this novella deals with grief, loss, generational trauma, domestic abuse, and survival - and does it so marvelously in just 120 pages.
The writing is absolutely magical - very poetic and lyrical, giving it a fairytale feel, even though the content itself is absolutely horrific at times. We knows it's set in the American Midwest but there's not really a clear vision of whether this is the past or some dystopian future, or maybe a combo of the two. But the bleakness of the town, the numbness of drones monitoring the endless farmland, the daily grind of our narrator taking care of everything in her home as well as her mother and little brother while not even bothering about what it's going to her - it all makes for a heartbreaking but resilient tale of a young woman determined to protect her beloved brother and ensure that he is able to escape this cycle of abuse.
I'm not sure I completely understood every metaphor here, and the power of art and transformation while being an integral part here didn't really move me. What I loved was our unnamed narrator's relentless strength and selfless love and the ending was both bittersweet but hopeful. Just go for this short novella if you have some time and want to experience something which is beautifully dark and nightmarish but also full of love.
