Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tor­dotcom 978-1-250-85097-3, $19.99, 128pp, hc) February 2023.

Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Drag­ons ranked pretty high on my list of last year’s outstanding fantasy novels, a highly original combination of feminist coming-of-age tale, alternate history period piece, and metamor­phosis myth, all cast in the form of a memoir, or what used to be called a personal history. That combination of domestic realism and family strife with high-concept fantasy bor­dering on absurdism is at work again in The Crane Husband, which is a variant retelling of the Japanese folktale ‘‘The Crane Wife’’ (which gets briefly recounted in the text, and which was also the source of a Patrick Ness novel a few years ago). In Barnhill’s near-future version, the widowed mother of a rural Midwestern family shows up for dinner look­ing disheveled and bringing along an enor­mous wounded crane – complete with hat and glasses – whom she insists the children call Father. The children are the 15-year-old narrator and her six-year-old brother Michael, who live on farmland long since taken over by corporations who run all the regional farms remotely, using robot tractors and drones. The mother is a talented but distracted fabric art­ist who, even before the crane arrives, ‘‘lived in her own head sometimes,’’ leaving it up to the teenage daughter to manage household and business affairs, as did the similarly bright but rebellious teenager in When Women Were Dragons. At one point, the premise of that novel seems to be alluded to when the mother insists that ‘‘On the farm… mothers fly away like migrating birds,’’ while the fathers die young and the children find themselves saddled with unwelcome responsibilities.

Once the crane arrives, the dreamily infatu­ated mother becomes even more erratic and secretive. She no longer allows the children to visit her studio, where she hides out with the crane, supposedly working on some sort of tapestry masterpiece. (In the original tale, it’s the crane wife who produces her art in secret.) She grows gaunt and pale, showing up for breakfast with cuts and abrasions, which she shrugs off even as the daughter has to treat her wounds. The narrator is also left to deal with managing the family business (under the guise of a fictional online agent named Bruce), as well as fending off a snoopy social worker, her teachers, and her school princi­pal. But as the mother’s distraction leads to declining sales of her art and of her artisan cheese, the family descends into near-poverty, until the narrator becomes convinced that she must face some dramatic choices.

As with When Women Were Dragons, Barnhill’s convincing depiction of a family under stress and a girl’s discovery of her own agency is far more interesting than the crane himself, who first shows up as an almost comi­cal figure (with that hat and those spectacles) and later turns into an emblem of sexual obsession with more than a few undertones of toxic masculinity – a kind of cross between a cartoon bird and Stanley Kowalski. While the crane-mother relationship may be the main plot engine, the depiction of the mother’s commitment to her art is an insightful exploration of the relationship between inspiration and obsession. But the relationships that give the novella its deepest resonances are those between the narrator and her little brother, and (in a few flashbacks) with her late father. Like Kelly Link, Barnhill has a keen eye for the disturbing subtexts of a familiar tale, and a distinctive talent for making that tale her own, in this case through a shrewd combina­tion of near-future SF, economic stress, family dynamics, and pure magic.