Review: 'The Crane Husband,' by Kelly Barnhill

In a sadly familiar not-too-distant future where vast monocultural farms are run from afar by corporations and patrolled by drones, a woman who is a widow, a mother and a tapestry artist lives in a vestigial farmhouse with her 6-year-old son Michael and the 15-year-old daughter who narrates this slim (but not thin) novel by Newbery Medal-winning Minnesota author Kelly Barnhill.

One day the woman comes home with a 6-foot-tall crane, who moves in and wreaks havoc on the household, not least the besotted woman, already a somewhat indifferent parent now reduced to a neglectful wraith, wandering the house wearing multiplying bruises and cuts from the violent lovemaking that the children are unfortunate enough to overhear. (As the narrator says: Gross.)

The mother has brought home other casually acquired lovers — just never a crane. And they've all soon departed. Not the crane — and when this becomes clear, along with his toxic effect on the household, the never-named narrator, who's held her fragile family together since her father's death, begins to look for a solution.

Meanwhile, she's locked out of her mother's studio in the barn, where, with the crane malevolently hovering, the woman seems to be working on something monumental (and, in a quite literal sense, fantastic).

If you can get past — or better yet, go along with — the crane, this brief book is absorbing, thought-provoking, and, in spite of or perhaps because of its outlandish premise, irresistibly readable. In the Japanese folk tale that the novel inverts, a crane makes herself seem human to keep the man she loves, each night, locked away with her weaving, plucking out her feathers; each morning, emerging exhausted.

The Crane Wife might be familiar to readers because of its use as a central conceit in a viral 2019 essay by C.J. Hauser. Hauser's verdict: "To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work."

In the world of "The Crane Husband" it is the men, hard and mean, who are meant to stay, keeping the farm, while the mothers, once their offspring can be counted on to survive, fly away. "Like migrating birds," the narrator's mother says. "This is why farmers have daughters. To keep things going in the meantime, until it's our time to grow wings."

In the meantime, she makes her tapestries, "massive things … [that] told stories inside of stories — the sweep of time and the tragedy of love and the persistent presence of the grave. ... There were appliquéd women made from feathers and barbed wire, stitched onto the backing with golden thread. Babies made from buttons. Children cut from the yellowed paper of eviction notices. Men made out of patchwork shoe leather and drenched with tears."

"Art, true art, exists only to transform," she tells her daughter, who's desperate to sell the tapestries so they can buy groceries. "And it is only truly art when it does transform. The maker. The viewer. Everyone."

Can Kelly Barnhill transform the contemporary fairytale skeptic into a believer? You'll have to read "The Crane Husband" and see.

Ellen Akins is a writer and a teacher of writing in Wisconsin.

The Crane Husband
By: Kelly Barnhill.
Publisher: Tor, 128 pages, $19.99.