dom's spotlight: 07/16/23
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What happens when the person you love most refuses to love themselves?
What happens when your most beautiful creation is invaded and turned to ash?
What happens when a young girl asks if it can be different, when she has only ever known hard men and vanished women, specters that stare back in old photographs and her mother’s eyes?
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
“The more you love someone, the more willing you are to show them your throat.”
A struggling widowed mother. A six foot crane wearing a dusty fedora. Please, call it ‘Father’.
Using fairy tale, folk lore, and violence that unnerves, Kelly Barnhill braves the trapeze in this slim volume of possession, sacrifice, and generational trauma.
A haunting and lyrical reimagining of the Japanese myth Tsuru Nyōbō (The Crane Wife), we are introduced to a small family after a terrible tragedy; a father taken too soon. Forced to sell the family farm to an unknowable conglomerate that tends to the land via drones, the mother does what she can to provide with her incredible tapestries. That is, until the Crane arrives.
Our protagonist, her daughter, does everything she can to protect her little brother from the worst of it as she watches her Mom devolve, getting skinnier and more torn up by the sharp beak of the Crane, as their house fills up with feathers and her mother’s blood.
Barnhill is able to take the most ridiculous and turn it into the most lurid tale I have read in a while. She takes the ludicrous seriously, allowing the imagery to stain your brain. Her prose is so gorgeous that it balances the acid in the text, and I read this in one breathless sitting - a Rorschach test of a modern fairy tale that isn’t easily categorized, even if it is the stuff of nightmares.
“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?
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