Few books have left me as haunted as Kelly Barnhill’s mesmeric The Crane Husband. I find myself thinking about it at odd moments: while in conversation, in transit as the day deepens to night and New York puts on her diamonds, alone in the wolf-light of the dawn, a cat snuggled on the duvet beside me.
It packs so many things into a slim novella: the pained dignity of latchkey kids, the wound a dead parent leaves behind; what we forgive when we’re in love, what we ignore because of that love; how women are commoditized and villainized; the rigors of being different, of wanting to be different.
But let’s walk it back a second before we go too deeply into the woods of Vibes. What is the literal story here? At the most basic level, The Crane Husband is a retelling of The Crane Wife, except here, it is an artist who loses her husband and who brings home a six-feet tall crane to the horror of her oldest daughter. It is a story as well of those liminal days when a child finds themselves evaluating an interloper, this pretender to the family, this creature demanding they be loved as an absent parent was.
What gets to me, though, about the book is how it captures the hunger of women. That longing for when one’s responsibilities can be put down. That voracious want for the day it is okay to unfetter one’s wings, to shed what is unexpected and finally go feral. It makes me think of every man who has said they’d wanted the wildness in a woman, and only really wanted it to be something they could master.
You should pre-order the book. It is Very Good.
***
In other news, it is fall and the year is going as gold as my beloved Big Orange, and I am so happy for the mineral crispness, and the bite of the wind, and how the air feels like silver, and the fact I am still here. I’d forgotten how good New York can be for me. It is, I know, for some people, a city to visit, but I fell so madly in love with her the first time I laid eyes on her, and none of that has gone away. For all her faults, for all the places lost now to the pandemic and gentrification, for all the new adversities, New York remains my truest love.
There have been other good things too. But you’ll have to wait to find out about those.
As always, a cat photo:
I'll definitely be checking this book out now. Also your cats are beauties.
What a beautiful longing you instilled in me for this book! Thank you!