Crow Talk
A Novel
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Nationally bestselling author of The Music of Bees Eileen Garvin returns with a moving story of hope, healing, and unexpected friendship set amidst the wild natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
Frankie O’Neill and Anne Ryan would seem to have nothing in common. Frankie is a lonely ornithologist struggling to salvage her dissertation on the spotted owl following a rift with her advisor. Anne is an Irish musician far from home and family, raising her five-year-old son, Aiden, who refuses to speak.
At Beauty Bay, a community of summer homes nestled on the shores of June Lake, in the remote foothills of Mount Adams, it’s off-season with most houses shuttered for the fall. But Frankie, adrift, returns to the rundown caretaker’s cottage that has been in the hardworking O'Neill family for generations—a beloved place and a constant reminder of the family she has lost. And Anne, in the wake of a tragedy that has disrupted her career and silenced her music, has fled to the neighboring house, a showy summer home owned by her husband's wealthy family.
When Frankie finds an injured baby crow in the forest, little does she realize that the charming bird will bring all three lost souls—Frankie, Anne, and Aiden—together on a journey toward hope, healing, and rediscovering joy. Crow Talk is an achingly beautiful story of love, grief, friendship, and the healing power of nature in the darkest of times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two women bond while staying on a remote mountain lake in Garvin's touching if predictable latest (after The Music of Bees). Frankie, an ornithologist, is holed up in a small cabin in Washington State, unmoored by the sudden death of her father and her falling out with an adviser. Anne, a composer with writer's block who's on leave from the Seattle college where she teaches, is staying at her wealthy in-laws' lake house with her nonspeaking five-year old son, Aiden. The two women forge a bond after Aiden, who is weary around most people, wanders into Frankie's cabin and becomes fascinated with an injured baby crow she's nursing back to health. In chapters told from alternating points of view, readers watch the women grow closer as each grapples with her personal problems. Though the various plot strands get tied up a bit too neatly, Garvin evocatively renders the beauty of the mountain landscape, and she excels at depicting the fault lines in her characters' lives ("Nobody could tell you how to fix the errors in the composition of your singular family"). Readers in the mood for a happy ending will be carried away. Agents: Heather Carr and Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency.
