Review by Booklist Review
In this chilling novella, a young teen girl fights to keep her family afloat. Her mother is an eclectic artist, making wondrous tapestries and mediocre artisan cheese on a farm that was productive in the days before the corporations and their buyouts and drones arrived. The mother's art is good, but ever since the the father died, the practicalities have fallen to the wayside. That's where Bruce, the teenage daughter disguised behind a formal voice and a too-adult sensibility, comes in. Bruce balances the books, makes the sales, pays the bills, and gets her brother to school. But the entire balance is threatened when her mother brings home a man-sized crane--and begins to grow distant, haunted, and thin. This dark novella is woven from threads of classic fairy tales of crane wives and men who turn into beasts, braided with the bleak sensibility of the midwestern gothic and the compelling determination of a young girl who needs to protect her little brother. It is a fast-moving, lush story that refuses to end neatly, a story of flighty mothers and the daughters who die a little keeping their families alive. Fans of fairy-tale retellings will eat this one up.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
A teen in a fading Midwestern farm town takes care of her younger brother while their artist mother is preoccupied with work and lovers. Their mother's attention strays further with the arrival of an enormous crane that she welcomes into the family. Threatened by the crane's violent intrusion, their mother's growing obsession with her newest artwork, and an investigating social worker, the narrator tries to protect her family. The novella is inspired by the folktale of the crane wife but what at first seems like a straightforward gender swap evolves to explore the boundaries between love and obligation. Readers are likely to grasp the sympathetic narrator's situation much earlier than she does. VERDICT Beyond retelling a folktale, Barnhill (When Women Were Dragons) constructs nuanced characters with conflicting motivations and loyalties. The plot is sometimes slow-moving as readers wait for the narrator to catch up, but it arrives at a thought-provoking conclusion.--Erin Niederberger
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