‘My family had told stories of women becoming birds since before my mother was born,’ the 15 year old narrator tell us in Kelly Barnhill’s novella The Crane Husband, launching us into a world where the magic of myths might still linger as we churn onward into an increasingly automated, mechanical world.The descendant of farmers, our narrator has learned to be tough, taking care of all the family finances, cooking, cleaning and raising of her little brother, Michael, since her father passed away. But when an actual crane comes to stay, usurping her father’s role as her tapestry artist mother falls deeply in love and spends all day in the studio or in bed with the crane neglecting her children, and with no money or food coming in, things begin to get desperate and our narrator must take action. A sinister and subversive modern retelling of the Japanese myth Tsuru Nyōbō (The Crane Wife) , Kelly Barnhill weaves her own magic in this deeply layer, eerie tale where grim realities of generational trauma and domestic abuse collide with the powers of art and myth making for a delightfully dark read.There are variations on the original folktale, but the basis is that a farmer marries a crane disguised as a woman who then uses her own feathers to weave beautiful tapestries which the farmer sells and becomes rich. But he is never happy, always demanding more and more, unaware his wife—who grows thinner by the day and does not allow him to watch her weave—is actually a crane. The story is of interest to the father, who tells our narrator this story as he is on his deathbed, seeing as his wife is herself a weaver and he explains the long history of weavers in myths around the world being able to change fate with the single pull of a thread. But ‘why a crane?’ he wonders of the folktale:‘Cranes are mean. Cruel, you know? Just ask any frog or fish in the pond. A crane is a predator just like any other predator-sneaky, and opportunistic. Not one of them would have the patience for weaving, or for beauty for its own sake. A crane would make someone else do it for him. A mouse maybe. Or a beautiful spider. He'd work it nearly to death, and then he'd eat it.’This may prove darkly portentous in Barnhill’s retelling, where the cruel animalistic behavior of the crane is also metaphorical for abuse. Barnhill’s tale hinges on the believability that the mother is dating a literal crane and, wonder upon wonders, she pulls it off beautifully. A Newbery Medal Winner for her absolutely stunning junior fiction novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Barnhill has an incredible capacity for infusing childlike wonderment and whimsy into dark adult fiction that makes this novel work so successfully. While aimed at an adult audience, this is a story that would likely register equally well with anyone from teenagers on, having a sort of timeless and broad appeal much like folktales themselves. ‘I was nothing like my mother. I was everything like my mother. Both at the same time.’Generational trauma is at the heart of this story, with the narrator hearing the long legacy of hard fathers and vanished women on the family farm. The mother explains it very plainly, insisting on it as literal fact despite the narrator questioning if this was just a metaphor: “On the farm,” she said quietly, “mothers fly away like migrating birds. And fathers die too young. This is why farmers have daughters. To keep things going in the meantime, until it’s our time to grow wings. Go soaring away across the sky.” What a legacy to have to live up to, especially in a town where her family is the source of gossip with more believable tales of her grandmother hopping a train to become strung out on drugs. All tales the mother dismisses as the typical misogynistic response to the inherent magic of women, yet she herself has not flown away in keeping with the timeline of farm mothers taking flight when their children reach the age of 5. Instead she weaves tapestries, which the daughter sells online under the fake name “Bruce. ‘My mother’s tapestries contained multitudes,’ she tells us of her mother’s artwork that has moved people to tears or break out in song, ‘her method of gathering materials was as haphazard and serendipitous as the way she lived the rest of her life…each item was stitched into the story.’ Barnhill nests the idea of creating narratives into her own story, reminding us that ‘art exists to transcend, transfix, and transform.’ This is a lovely sentiment, enlarged all the more considering The Crane Husband is itself transcending and transforming a familiar tale into a modern context about family and trauma.‘No one person owned the farm. No one walked the farm. The farm belonged to machines and shareholders. No one loved it anymore. No one was tied to it anymore.’The family legacy with the farm has been severed, however, as the family had to sell it off decade ago. ‘There was no farm anymore to fly from,’ the narrator considers, wondering if this is why their mother hasn’t followed the family tradition of flying away, ‘how can you run from your birthright when your birthright is gone?’ The farm now belonged to a conglomerate of stock-holders living far away and the rows and rows of corn are no longer tended by the hands of laborers and run entirely by machines. Drones police the skies while automated plows tend the fields, with living people only arriving once a year for a share-holder meeting to ‘pretend that they were still connected to the land.’ This dystopian farm setting probes fears of humans put out of work by machines, but also is representative of a world where magic and myths are fading such as the legacy of women transforming into birds. ‘Even birds weren’t allowed,’ we are told and the sky is entirely empty aside from the drones keeping anyone away, drones with sharp blades that could slice up a crane if it flew across the field, or the mysterious naked man that one night appeared in their barn bleeding from a run-in with the drones.Barnhill also employs this lifeless farm as an expression of climate change. We see the industrialization of the farm leaving behind ‘the plowed-up remains of coyotes and foxes and birds littering the fields,’ while the drones are ‘devouring the world with their eyes.’ There is an unsettling tone built through menacing depictions of the natural world, the sky always oppressively empty, and even the stars are ‘so bright and sharp it hurt to look at.’ Spring seems to come earlier each year to this midwest town and ‘soon, people said, there would be no winter at all.’ As the methods of old, the storytelling of old, begins to vanish along with the mythology they carry, so too does the world as it is replaced by heartless machines and algorithms.‘How can anyone survive that kind of love?’The abuse of the planet is mirrored in the abusive relationships in the story. The mother tells of her father being a ‘hard’ man, of the ways he beat his wife until she finally flew away. This opens a cycle of excusing abuse, with the mother frequently bruised after encounters with brief lover. The gashes left on her body from the crane’s beak and talons during their time in bed (oh yes, Barnhill goes there) she dismisses as natural—he is a wild animal after all—which implies that she views the bruises from being hit during the night by what must be a man in the house as just the natural way of things as well. This harkens back to the original tale in which the man becomes abusive as his mysterious wife doesn’t produce enough art fast enough for him, and we see the mother deteriorating as she struggles to achieve a tapestry that satisfies the crane. Like the crane wife growing thinner as she uses up her feathers, the mother grows thinner without nourishment and the children go hungry. Yet she doesn’t seem to notice or care. ‘You can’t live on love, Mom,’ the daughter admonishes her, ‘it’s not possible.’‘She was a flash of downy white, leaving the farm behind. Feathers and wings and all. And sky for days.’Kelly Barnhill pulls off a nearly miraculous narrative here, stitching reality, myth, art and the power of storytelling into her own startling tapestry. The story moves slowly but engagingly, weaving the past and present together towards a shocking but well-earned climax that is certain to satisfy. Even at its most unsettling, Barnhill’s prose proves oddly comforting, seducing the reader forward with a rather dreamlike cadence full of striking imagery and rolling phrasing, even when the dreamlike nature becomes a waking nightmare. The characters are quite endearing too, from the narrator dodging Social Services to care for her charming little brother, to even the sinister crane who is handled with such expertise as to really bring his scenes to life regardless of how outlandish they would otherwise seem. Everything feels very natural, everything is expertly balanced, tight and taut across this 120pg novella, and Barnhill’s history working in children’s literature comes alive making this a fairy tale for adults that reads with a charm rarely felt beyond being an actual child reading the finest of imaginative junior fiction. I'm told the story bears resemblance to her previous novel, When Women Were Dragons, though here it is working as a retelling and done in a slight amount of space. The Crane Husband is a massive success and an unnerving foray into abuse and myth that has like left its feather in my heart and mind where they will stay for a long, long time.4.5/5‘I could make it beautiful. I could make everything beautiful. Art could change your life. Art could give you wings. And you could fly away. Don’t you want to fly away?’