The Crane Husband
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Nebula Award nominee for Best Novella
World Fantasy Award nominee for Best Novella
“If I had to nominate a worthy successor to Angela Carter, I would nominate Kelly Barnhill. "—Laura Ruby, two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Bone Gap
"A slim little novella that packs a narrative punch more intense than that of many books ten times its length."—NPR
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
