Genre: magical realism

#AudioBookReview: Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Lovers at the Museum by Isabel AllendeLovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende
Narrator: Nicholas Boulton
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism, short stories
Pages: 25
Length: 38 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on April 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind Knows My Name comes a mesmerizing tale of two passionate souls who share one magical night that defies all rational explanation.
Love, be it wild or tender, often defies logic. In fact, at times, the only rationale behind the instant connection of two souls is plain magic.
Bibiña Aranda, runaway bride, wakes up in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still wearing her wedding dress, draped in the loving arms of a naked man whose name she doesn’t know. She and the man with no clothes, Indar Zubieta, attempt to explain to the authorities how they got there. It’s a story of love at first sight and experience beyond compare, one that involves a dreamlike journey through the museum.
But the lovers’ transcendent night bears no resemblance to the crude one Detective Larramendi attempts to reconstruct. And no amount of fantastical descriptions can convince the irritated inspector of the truth.
Allende’s dreamy short story has the power to transport readers in any language, leaving them to ponder the wonders of love long after the story’s over.

My Review:

Lovers at the Museum caught my eye primarily for the audiobook. The narrator, Nicholas Boulton, is the voice of one of my favorite characters in the video game Mass Effect Andromeda. (A game that is much better than the reviews would lead one to believe, but that is not the topic of this review.)

Back on topic, at least a bit more on topic, I have to say that he didn’t sound much like that character in this narration, which I should have expected because they’re not remotely alike nor should they be and that’s just plain good acting.

Which leads me back, again, by a meandering path, to this lovely little short story about, well, love, and magic, and the magic of love.

Although it starts out with the evidence of a whole lot of lust – as that’s a much easier thing to get a handle on – particularly when one of the protagonists is still presenting a handle. So to speak.

Ahem.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of modern and contemporary art in Spain’s Basque region (pictured at left) is already a magical place, both for its bulky, blocky and some would even say Brutalist, design, and in this story, at least, for the strange and weird things that happen within its walls.

This incident would add to that legend.

The morning staff of the museum discovered two disheveled, entwined, partially nude lovers in one of the galleries sleeping off a night of lustful debauchery that shouldn’t have happened at all. Not for particularly nefarious reasons but simply because they entered while the museum was closed – and should have triggered alarms in every single room they came into – which seems to have been all of them.

They say the door opened for them. They claim that they weren’t really in the museum, but in a magical pleasure palace.

The local police inspector, with a reputation for finding hidden clues, eliciting damning confessions, and a dogged determination to punish the guilty, is frustrated that he can’t break their ridiculous stories and isn’t sure what crime, if any, they actually committed.

It seems as if the magic of the Guggenheim claimed the lovers that incredible night, and it’s taking away the inspector’s will to punish them in the cold light of day.

Escape Rating B: This is short and very, very sweet – even though the inspector is downright salty for a lot of the story.

There’s a lot of salt to be had – at least from his perspective. He’s sure that someone HAS to be guilty of something prosecutable, and that someone is lying to him.

(I was betting on the museum officials lying to cover up less than attentive guards and not so secure security. It seemed like the obvious solution. Which it is logically but then again, this is about magic.)

The inspector wants to punish the lovers for their vice and their disrespect of the museum. But mostly because he envies them the magic of their love – something that is clearly lacking in his own life in spite of his decades long marriage – or perhaps because of it. That’s a bit hard to tell, but it’s sad no matter how one looks at it. Unless one is the inspector, in which case it’s downright tragic.

In the end, it all boils down to magic, the kind of magical realism that takes a story out of the everyday and sprinkles a bit of fairy dust over the proceedings. So short, sweet and utterly charming – including the inspector’s bluster.

Even better, if Isabel Allende is an author you’ve heard about but haven’t ever actually read – as was true for this reader – or if you’re not sure whether or not magical realism could be a flavor in your jam – this delightful short is the perfect way to stick your reading toe into magical realism with an author who is considered a master of the genre.

Grade A #BookReview: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: A Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas WesterbekeA Short Walk Through a Wide World by Douglas Westerbeke
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, magical realism, literary fiction
Pages: 399
Published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi in this dazzlingly epic debut that charts the incredible, adventurous life of one woman as she journeys the globe trying to outrun a mysterious curse that will destroy her if she stops moving.
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.
When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.
From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...
Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.

My Review:

The title is only half right. The world that Aubry Tourvel walks through is indeed wide, but her walk is far, far from short – especially from her own perspective.

That walk begins in 1885, when Aubry is all of 9 years old, the protected and spoiled youngest child of middle-class parents in Paris, France. Whether her condition is caused by a mysterious puzzle ball, her unwillingness to sacrifice it, or merely the whims of fate is never 100% certain – and it doesn’t need to be.

However the malady, or perhaps curse is a better term, was visited upon her, nevertheless one evening Aubry sits down at the dinner table and starts bleeding from seemingly every orifice while going into convulsions that wrack her entire body.

Medical science has neither diagnosis nor cure. All Aubry has to go by, on, for, and with, is her meager experience that when she changes location she immediately starts to heal, but when she stays in the same place for too long, the blood starts dripping out of her nose and her condition takes over.

Fast, hard and with extreme pain in every limb.

So Aubry is off, and so is the story. At first, with her whole family, moving from hôtel to hôtel in the suburbs of Paris, but then, as she runs out of places she hasn’t been yet, out into the countryside with her mother, Aubry’s knowledge of her mother’s utter exhaustion and total depression, and her awareness of her family’s dwindling finances.

Aubry runs away and leaves her mother behind. She’s all alone, walking that wide, wide world, at the age of twelve.

This is her story. It’s not exactly an adventure, although there are certainly adventures within it. It’s absolutely a story about the journey and not the destination, because as far as Aubry can discover, the only destination is death.

But along the way, for as many steps and as much time as Aubry has, there’s an ever-changing, always moving, and utterly fascinating life.

Escape Rating A: If you could put Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in 80 Days, both by Jules Verne and both still fairly new when Aubry begins her walk, into a book blender, you’d get at least the basic broth of Aubry’s long journey. A broth spiced with a bit of Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control.

The difference is that both of those classic stories are ‘there and back again’ adventures. The protagonists set out with every expectation that they will return home at the end, more or less safe and sound.

Aubry can neither go home, nor can she make a new one. She’s a human turtle, carrying her home on her back. And it’s HARD. It’s a hardness that both does and does not define her, and that’s what makes her journey so compelling to follow.

On the one hand, she has to be as self-sufficient as possible, because she knows that she will often be utterly alone, not because she wants to be, but because she travels through many of the empty places of the world, frequently on paths that no one else can see. At the same time, she learns that when she does find companions, the only thing she has to trade is her ability to use her self-sufficiency to help others.

But what keeps the reader with her is the emotional journey. She goes from spoiled to über capable. She goes from being done for to doing for others when possible and whatever is necessary to survive all the time.

And she goes from child to young woman to middle-aged and to elderly – one step at a time and always with the monkey of her condition on her back. She makes friends and loses them and drinks from all the springs of the world – but only to the shallowness of a teaspoon.

She samples but never stays. And we’re right there with her.

This is a story that grabbed me from the first page with the sheer puzzle of it. The idea of her endless journey, and even more fascinating still, the progress of it in a world where all the corners had not yet been filled in.

And that it was a woman’s journey and not a man’s. There were (and are) plenty of such journeys undertaken by men in fiction. When Aubry sets out, it was the age of such stories, often written by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Their tales often told stories of ‘big’ adventures of one sort or another.

Instead, Aubry’s journey is long rather than ‘big’. She’s not trying to become famous – although she does. She’s trying to survive and that gives her story a much different flavor and leads it towards a more authentic conclusion. In the end, as much as we may envy her ability to pick up stakes and travel, to make herself comfortable wherever she goes, we feel for her inability to ever take a break from it.

So, if you’re ever feeling like home is a bit too comfortable to ever leave, take A Short Walk Through a Wide World with Aubry Tourvel and travel by armchair with gratitude for the ability to take that walk with her without having to leave everything behind, and see the world from the perspective of someone else’s aching feet.

A- #BookReview: The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian HuangThe Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy romance, historical fantasy, M/M romance, magical realism, romantasy
Pages: 312
Published by Mira on March 26, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“What if I told you that the feeling we call love is actually the feeling of metaphysical recognition, when your soul remembers someone from a previous life?”
In the year 4 BCE, an ambitious courtier is called upon to seduce the young emperor—but quickly discovers they are both ruled by blood, sex and intrigue.
In 1740, a lonely innkeeper agrees to help a mysterious visitor procure a rare medicine, only to unleash an otherworldly terror instead.
And in present-day Los Angeles, a college student meets a beautiful stranger and cannot shake the feeling they’ve met before.
Across these seemingly unrelated timelines woven together only by the twists and turns of fate, two men are reborn, lifetime after lifetime. Within the treacherous walls of an ancient palace and the boundless forests of the Asian wilderness to the heart-pounding cement floors of underground rave scenes, our lovers are inexplicably drawn to each other, constantly tested by the worlds around them.
As their many lives intertwine, they begin to realize the power of their undying love—a power that transcends time itself…but one that might consume them both.
An unpredictable roller coaster of a debut novel, The Emperor and the Endless Palace is a genre-bending romantasy that challenges everything we think we know about true love.

My Review:

Three roads converge in the midst of a labyrinth. Three fates collide in never ending repetition. No matter where or when the tragedy recurs, nothing ever makes a difference in the ultimate outcome.

In other words, no matter where you go, there you are.

An emperor and a clerk in 4 BCE, an innkeeper and a mysterious stranger in 1740, a medical student and an artist in the now. Three times, three places, three romances, three tragedies.

Different incarnations, different times, different lives but the same results. Because this isn’t just a story of love lost and found, but a story of love lost because it has been betrayed, over and over again. An eternal triangle that hinges on the heart of the one who always remembers everything, and yet can’t stop himself from repeating the same old mistakes. Over and over and over again.

Because even death seems incapable of doing their spirits apart. Perhaps next time, because even if nothing else is certain, there will certainly be one.

Escape Rating A-: This story walks three paths, and at first it doesn’t seem like one has much to do with the other. It reminded me of stories about walking a maze of trials that leads to a central point, a trail of trials that no matter which path is walked that ultimately leads to the same place – and all too frequently the same goal or battle or contest or tragedy. A progression that, as the path is walked and the spiral gets tighter, allows brief glimpses into the spirals on either side.

But at the beginning, the relationship between Dong Xian’s precarious climb up the ladder in Imperial China, He Shican’s nighttime wanderings in the woods around his remote inn in the mid-18th century, and River’s drug-induced hallucinations of the circuit party scene in today’s Los Angeles don’t have a connection that the reader can see.

It’s only in the dreams, nightmares and drug-induced ecstasy that the characters experience in each of the timelines that the stories begin, hazily at first, to reach out for each other – even as the contemporary characters in this never-ending story, River and Joey and Winston, come together and ultimately drive each other away.

Each of the stories begins slowly, but as they draw towards their individual conclusions that are all the same tragic ending, the inward spirals get faster and faster and tighter and tighter – like the loop of a noose closing around the throats of ALL the stories, leaving the reader breathless at the end.

An ending which may not be one at all.

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I started this book, although a friend’s absolute rave about it induced me to give this debut novel a try. And I’m glad I did because in the end I was completely blown away by this sexy, queer romantasy AND that it’s the author’s first.

I can’t wait to see what he does for an encore!

Grade A #AudioBookReview: What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison WattsWhat You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Narrator: Alison Watts
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, magical realism
Pages: 304
Length: 7 hours and 19 minutes
Published by Hanover Square Press, Harlequin Audio on September 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.
What are you looking for?
This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.
Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazine editor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.
With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.

My Review:

A 21-year old sales assistant, a 35-year old accounts manager, a 40-year old former magazine editor, a 65-year old recent retiree and a 30-year old who hasn’t found his way. Three men and two women. Different ages, different stages of life, different choices IN life. What do they have in common?

Each of these characters is at a crossroads in their lives, and each of them has taken the fork in the road that leads to the library. But not just any library, but the library in the Hatori Community Center, where Sayuri Komachi reigns over the reference desk as she relentlessly stabs her needle into her latest felting project.

Ms. Komachi has a gift, and not just for handicraft.

The characters in this collection of individual stories find their way to Mr. Komachi’s desk in the middle of their first-person narratives. So the reader – or in my case listener – already has an idea of what’s going on in their life at this particular moment and what decision – or lack thereof – has brought them into the busy, bustling Community Center to face its stabbing librarian.

(One of the narrators, that 30-year old who sees himself as a failed artist, both sees and hears Ms. Komachi with her furious needle as a fearsome character from a famous manga that both he and the librarian are familiar with.)

The librarian’s gift is to be the best this librarian has ever heard of at conducting what we call a “reference interview”. Ms. Komachi doesn’t just listen to what each person manages to say that they want, but also to intuit what each one actually wants and what information they need to make that happen – even if they had no idea themselves what was lurking in their heart of hearts.

She gives each person a ‘bonus gift’ from her box of complete handicrafts and sends them on their way, often with puzzled expressions on their faces as they try to figure out how what they blurted out resulted in something never expected but needed all the same.

Escape Rating A: Obviously I picked this up for the title, and I doubt that anyone is surprised by that. However, while I expected to like this book, I was surprised by just how charmed I was by each of the individual stories – whether or not I was feeling that particular character’s particular angst – or not – as they began their narrative.

Each story is individual – at least as it begins – with the initial link between the characters only in their encounter with the Community Center and Ms. Komachi. It’s only as we proceed from one to another we realize that they ARE interconnected, one directly to another, and that their collective connections form a community and ultimately a society.

Which also the theme of the retiree’s story that closes the book.

Because these stories are initially separate, and are told from each narrator’s first-person perspective, the choice the producers made to have a different voice actor for each section feels like the correct one. Each voice actor embodied their character while also making the voices of the people they encountered along their way distinctive.

That different characters therefore voiced Ms. Komachi rather differently, which also reflected their individual perspectives and worked particularly well. Even though by listening I missed the artist’s rendering of the individual characters that accompanied each story, I’m still happy that I listened to the audio instead.

As much as I enjoyed the narration, which I very much did, it’s the stories themselves that give the collection its charm, as was true in similar books such as The Kamogawa Food Detectives and Before the Coffee Gets Cold – the latter of which this book is frequently compared to, along with The Midnight Library of which this reader is considerably less certain but now rather curious about.

The stories in THIS book are all slices of life, and slices of very familiar lives; a young woman in her first full-time job not sure if it’s what she really wants or what she wants to do with the life in front of her before it passes her by, a more established man who KNOWS he’s not doing what he wants to do with his life but is afraid to give up security to pursue his dream, a working mother whose work dreams have been sacrificed to the care of a loved and wanted child but is having difficulty reconciling her plans with her reality, a 30 year old still living at home who has no confidence in himself and a retired ‘company man’ who can’t figure out who he is or how he fits in a world where he has no job and no set place in that world.

They all read like real people, their crises all feel like part of the real world, and the solutions all seem very possible. But there’s still just a bit of magic in these seemingly mundane tales, and it’s not just the magic of Ms. Komachi and her knack for finding the right book for the right person at the right time.

It’s the magic of getting caught up in, not just one lovely story, but five lovely stories – all with just the right touch of honeyed sweetness in their endings.

A- #BookReview: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
A- #BookReview: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu KawaguchiBefore the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Narrator: Geoffrey Trousselot
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism, relationship fiction, time travel
Series: Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1
Pages: 272
Published by Picador on September 19, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

My Review:

We all have regrets. Things we wish we’d said or done differently. Words spoken in the heat of a moment that can’t be unsaid. Things we would have said or done if we’d known that this moment would be the last chance we’d ever have to say or do those things.

This book is a collection of stories, first in a series of such collections, that features a Potterverse-type Time Turner in the form of one single seat in a tiny Tokyo cafe. Just as in Harry Potter, the rules for turning back time are very specific.

The would-be time traveler can’t change the present, no matter what they or anyone else does in the past. Which is actually a rather limited slice of that past, as they can’t leave the cafe – they can’t even leave their seat – and they can only remain in the past for the length of time it takes for one cup of coffee to get cold – which they also must drink before it does.

Just getting the opportunity to try is a cautionary tale, as the seat they can’t leave is occupied nearly, but not quite, 24 hours a day by the ghost of a woman who didn’t follow all the rules. A solid ghost who will curse anyone who tries to move them forcibly but needs to get up and go to the bathroom once every day.

So the opportunities are very definitely limited. Which doesn’t stop people from trying, and even – occasionally – succeeding. After all, just because you can’t change the present – just as in the Potterverse you couldn’t change something that you already KNEW had happened – there is a loophole.

Just because you can’t change the present, it doesn’t mean that you can’t grab the opportunity for just a little bit of closure. And it absolutely doesn’t mean that having a second chance to say the right thing then doesn’t mean you can’t change the future that proceeds from now. Even if all you do is change a heart, that might very well be enough – even if it’s just your own.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up – in fact I bought the whole series so far – because I’ve enjoyed several books recently that used this one as a pattern; Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. I’m also in the middle of listening to What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, which also follows a similar pattern.

Each book is a collection of several “slices of life” stories linked by a central theme or location, or even better, both. In each case, the protagonists of the individual stories are changed in some way by their interactions with the place and its proprietor(s), with each story having its own little catharsis while the framing story carries the reader from one to the next.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a lovely little collection – to the point where its easy to see why it started this trend.

In this particular case, the stories start out at a remove from the central characters. Nagare, Kazu and Kei own and run the little cafe, which has been in business for a century-plus and has been frustratingly popularized as the place where you can step back in time but only if you follow those pesky, persnickety rules to the letter.

The first time-travel ‘customer’ that we meet is a woman who broke up with her boyfriend in the cafe – and wants to take it all back a week later after he’s moved to America. They’re discouraging, she’s driven, we get a full explanation of the quirks of the operation, and she does her best to say the things she wished she’d said – and is pretty sure that she fumbled so much she just made things worse. But it’s enough to shift her future the tiniest bit and gives the reader the possibility of a happy ending.

What makes the collection as a whole work is that the remaining stories move the time travel further back and forwards in time, but step by step – or story by story – closer to the cafe’s proprietors and from that sweet possibility of a happy ending to something much closer to the bitterness of the coffee they serve. With just a hint of sugar to help the poignancy to go down.

These are comfort reads, in the sense that each story’s resolution, even if it isn’t exactly happy, provides the relief of closure, the possibility of change and a sense of catharsis and resolution. The stories are each charming and lovely in their own right and make a surprisingly harmonious whole.

I needed just this kind of comfort read this week and this ‘sad fluff’ book filled that niche perfectly. I’ll certainly be back for the next book in the series, Tales from the Cafe, the next time I have a taste for something just the right side of bittersweet.

A- #BookReview: The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Fox Wife by Yangsze ChooThe Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy mystery, historical fantasy, magical realism
Pages: 390
Published by Henry Holt and Co. on February 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, or life force, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .
Manchuria, 1908.
A young woman is found frozen in the snow. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes involved, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and men. Bao, a detective with a reputation for sniffing out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach. Until, perhaps, now.
Meanwhile, a family that owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments, but not the curse that afflicts them―their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. Now the only grandson of the family is twenty-three. When a mysterious woman enters their household, their luck seems to change. Or does it? Is their new servant a simple young woman from the north or a fox spirit bent on her own revenge?
New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about a winter full of mysterious deaths, a mother seeking revenge, and old folktales that may very well be true.

My Review:

A hint of historical fantasy, a touch of magical realism, more than a soupçon of fantasy mystery, wrapped in a surprisingly lovely tissue of love lost and found. I wasn’t expecting all of those elements in The Fox Wife, but the twists and turns from one to another and back again kept me enthralled every step of this journey’s way.

The fox spirit Snow is searching for the man responsible for the death of her cub. Bao, a detective/fixer/spy, is looking for foxes. Or rather, he’s hunting for fox spirits around the edges of the other, more practical things and people he generally looks for. In this particular case, the identity of a nameless young courtesan frozen to death behind a popular eatery. And the location of a young would-be concubine missing from a rich man’s keeping, a woman he claims is his wife-to-be, who he also claims to be possessed by a fox.

Although much of the story is told from Snow’s perspective, as a fox she’s more than a bit of an unreliable narrator. Which isn’t helped at all by the fact that she’s lying to herself even more than she is to the reader. There are things she doesn’t want to face, so she’s not – not even when they are right in her face.

Bao, on the other hand, has reached a point in his life where he’s mostly honest with himself, about both his past AND his present. At least the parts of his past where other people have been honest with him.

Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a blank spot in his narrative as well, but where Snow knows what happened and doesn’t want to even think about it, Bao doesn’t know all of the foundational elements of his story, so keeps poking at a void that he doesn’t have the filling for.

From one perspective, this is a revenge story – or at least Snow thinks it is. Her cub is dead because a photographer was paying for a fox cub to photograph. She’s following the trail of the photographer as all sorts of roadblocks, past and present, internal and external, get in her somewhat meandering way.

Bao is following the trail of a missing person. He’s doing his job. That his job is to find Snow is something he circles towards even as Snow herself gets closer to him and to her own quest. But neither of them is in pursuit of what they believed they were. And once they figure THAT out, they each find what they were truly seeking all along.

Which was never, ever, truly each other.

Escape Rating A-: The Fox Wife is a story at an inflection point, and it manages to blend in aspects of so many genres because it takes place on the cusps of so many changes – not just for its characters but for the world in which it is set.

The story itself is at the crossroads between the numinous and the mundane, as embodied in the two narratives, the literal ‘fox wife’ Snow and the pragmatic detective, who is old enough to have a foot in both camps, as his life was influenced by magic in his childhood, at a time when beliefs in the other were still very much present.

A time that has passed, as the story takes place in China at the end of the Qing Dynasty, just as the last emperor was crowned in 1908 and World War I is looming on the horizon. The remoter places where magic still had sway, such as the places where the foxes lived, are diminishing as technology conquers magic or at least the belief in it, whether literally or figuratively.

Part of that inflection is that the two narratives, Snow’s and Bao’s, follow different paths and operate at different paces. Snow meanders, where Bao mostly follows mystery conventions – at least in his actions – even if his thoughts occasionally wander to his own past.

Which gave this reader a bit of a conflicting reaction, as I was both absolutely riveted AND wished there’d been a bit more editing to cut down on the meandering. I loved the story but I’d have loved it a bit more if it had been about 50 pages shorter. Your reading mileage may vary.

(Honestly, I know which character I’d cut to get those 50 pages down.)

What brought the whole story full circle, for all of its many, many circles, was the way that Snow’s past and Bao’s past eventually intersected in the present, but not in any of the ways that these kinds of quasi-myths often do.

Instead, they intersect in a way that fits them both into the present they are actually living in, in ways that would work with magic or without. Because just as Snow owns her own past and her own responsibility for the tragedies she has tried so hard not to face, Bao finds his way back to the best of his, in the present that he has, and finds his way to the future that he’s always desired but was never able to admit.

Which resolved the two halves of this story into one surprisingly harmonious whole.

#BookReview Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr RobertsWild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction, magical realism
Pages: 304
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A gorgeous debut, laced through with magic, following four generations of women as they seek to chart their own futures. Evangeline Hussey’s husband is dead―lost at sea―and she has only managed to hold on to his Nantucket inn by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those around her. One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael, and her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a life from the pieces that remain.
Her choices ripple through generations, across continents, and into the depths of the sea, in a narrative that follows Evangeline and her descendants from mid-nineteenth century Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho. Moving, beautifully written, and elegantly conceived, Wild and Distant Seas takes Moby-Dick as its starting point, but Tara Karr Roberts brings four remarkable women to life in a spellbinding epic all her own.

My Review:

He said “Call me Ishmael” – and she did. But that is not where this distaff perspective on Moby-Dick begins.

It begins with Evangeline Hussey reinventing herself for the second time. The first time was when she ran away from a past we never see and found herself on Nantucket Island as the whaling industry was nearing the end of its heyday. She marries an innkeeper and intends to settle down for the rest of her life making chowder.

But Evangeline has a gift. She has just a bit of magic, a spark that allows her to do two things she’s going to rely on and fight against in the years to come. She can see through the eyes of people she knows, and she can make people believe and even DO what she wants. Through her gift, she sees that her husband’s small boat has capsized and he has drowned at sea, but she enforces the belief among the townspeople that he is just away on a business trip and will be back sooner or later.

It’s a lie she continually reinforces because she knows that his family – who have lived in Nantucket for generations – mightily disapprove of her and her marriage, and that they will take the inn away from her if they can. It’s the only home she knows and she can’t let that happen, so she lies and MAKES people believe it – for so many years that the lie reinforces itself.

Until Ishmael and Queequeg arrive at her Try Pots Inn, just before they sign up for Captain Ahad’s ill-omened and ultimately ill-fated voyage on the cursed Pequod. The story that Ishmael eventually tells in Moby-Dick.

But before the Pequod set sail, Ishmael and Evangeline had a brief dalliance that resulted in a child. A daughter born with no knowledge of her father but an even greater portion of her mother’s gifts.

Wild and Distant Seas is the story of Evangeline’s legacy, both her gifts and the endless pursuit of the missing Ishmael that she bequeathed to her daughter, her granddaughter, and even her great-granddaughter as they journey endlessly and fruitlessly, until at last one of them finally finds her way home.

Escape Rating B: Wild and Distant Seas is a story that is constantly in dialog with its predecessor, Moby-Dick. At points it hews close, and at others it is at more than a bit of a remove, but the great white whale is always swimming in the background.

And this is the point where I confess that I never read the damn thing. Yes, I know it’s considered to be one of the ‘Great American Novels’ and a literary classic, etc., etc., etc., but I was never forced to read it in high school and had no inclination afterward. It’s somewhere between a complete sausage fest and a boys’ own adventure (even if in the same way that Lord of the Flies is a boys’ own adventure) and the American literary canon is just full of those.

So part of my interest in Wild and Distant Seas was that it gives a distaff perspective on a story that otherwise doesn’t have a female perspective in it AT ALL. Considering how many men never came home from the whaling industry, a story about what happened after that was itself an interesting possibility for historical fiction, even if this book also has a bit of a literary fiction vibe to it.

What makes the story work is that it is absolutely NOT Ishmael’s story, as the original was. Instead, it’s the story of his absence and the lengths that absence drives Evangeline and her descendants to in pursuit of the truth of their origins. He’s a gaping hole in each of their histories that they are all trying to fill.

As each of the women in Evangeline’s line tell their stories, the other thread that links them is their use, misuse and abuse of the gift that they’ve inherited from her. Each of them is capable of bending others to their will, none of them are able to resist the impulse to use that power, and all of them ultimately realize that their gift has cost more than they’ve ever gained from it, which brings them, at last, back to their point of origin.

But the way each of their stories is told is through their first person perspective, with the torch of story passing from one woman to another when they each first use their gift, making each of their stories about the price they pay for that use.

Which, oddly enough, brings the story back to Moby-Dick and the price of Ahab’s obsession, in more ways than one.

In the end, as the story shifted protagonists and perspectives, I found some of their journeys more compelling than others, and I empathized more with Evangeline’s adult perspective than I did the learning period that her descendants inevitably went through. So ultimately I have mixed feelings but this turned out to be a fascinating way to explore a classic from a sideways point of view.

Review: The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Star and the Strange Moon by Constance SayersThe Star and the Strange Moon by Constance Sayers
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 480
Published by Redhook on November 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the author of A Witch in Time comes a haunting tale of ambition, obsession, and the eternal mystery and magic of film.
1968: Actress Gemma Turner once dreamed of stardom. Unfortunately, she’s on the cusp of slipping into obscurity. When she’s offered the lead in a radical new horror film, Gemma believes her luck has finally changed. But L’Etrange Lune’s set is not what she expected. The director is eccentric, and the script doesn’t make sense.
Gemma is determined to make this work. It’s her last chance to achieve her dream—but that dream is about to derail her life. One night, between the shadows of an alleyway, Gemma disappears on set and is never seen again. Yet, Gemma is still alive. She’s been transported into the film and the script—and the monsters within it—are coming to life. She must play her role perfectly if she hopes to survive.
2015: Gemma Turner’s disappearance is one of film history’s greatest mysteries—one that’s haunted film student Christopher Kent ever since he saw his first screening of L’Etrange Lune. The screenings only happen once a decade and each time there is new, impossible footage of Gemma long after she vanished. Desperate to discover the truth, Christopher risks losing himself. He’ll have to outrun the cursed legacy of the film—or become trapped by it forever.

My Review:

The Star and the Strange Moon is a story about hunger, greed, obsession, the power of movies to make magic and, surprisingly, the power of magic to make movies.

This timeslip story has two beginnings, as timeslip stories often do. At first, neither the reader nor the characters have any clue what one will have to do with the other – which is what fuels the obsession and powers the whole journey, both magical and mundane.

In 1986, a woman sees a photograph on a wall and pretty much loses her damn mind. Not that she hasn’t been heading that direction for quite some time, after nearly two decades of brief fortune, lost fame, failed hopes, and entirely too much sex and drugs and, as it turns out, not nearly enough rock and roll.

Her son, all of ten years old, has been the adult in their nomadic existence for seemingly all of his life, taking care of his mother as she drives them from one brief, often catastrophic singing gig to another, making sure she doesn’t kill herself with booze or drugs and talking her down from whatever figurative ledge she’s climbed up to this time.

But something about that photograph on the wall rips away his mother’s last grasp on sanity or reality or normalcy or all of the above in a way that both changes and makes Christopher Kent’s young life – even if, at age ten – he has no idea what who the woman in that photograph was or what any of it means.

The perspective then switches to the woman in the photograph, Gemma Turner, back in 1968, when she was a formerly up and coming actress and the current ‘old lady’ for a rock singer on the cusp of either greatness or being thrown out of his own band. Gemma wants out and away, so she takes the only acting job offered, to star in a horror movie for a French New Wave director who may be a genius director but has no clue about the conventions of the horror genre he plans to both break and break into.

One night, in the middle of filming L’Etrange Lune in a tiny French village, Gemma Turner disappears in the middle of a shoot – literally in the middle of a shot while the camera is recording it all. She wakes up in what appears to be a real-life version of the set of the movie, complete with its ‘strange moon’, in what seems to be 1878, in the person of the character she was portraying.

A character who is soon to be drained to death by a vampire. Unless, somehow, she can change the script.

Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, her disappearance turns into a mystery that swallows the life of everyone the movie or the woman ever touched. Including, eventually and inevitably, the life of one Christopher Kent, who has no idea who Gemma Turner was or what she might possibly have ever done to his mother.

It will become Christopher’s obsession – and his life’s journey – to find the answer to ALL the mysteries that have grown up around Gemma Turner’s disappearance. It’s a discovery that will break him, make him, and enthrall him to the very end.

And the reader right along with him.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I adored the author’s earlier book, The Ladies of the Secret Circus, with its blend of history, mystery and magic, and The Star and the Strange Moon looked like it was in the same vein.

Which turned out to be true a bit more literally than I imagined, adding to the mystery of the story and my compulsion to finish it because there were bits that started to sound just a bit more familiar than I expected.

They are not the same story, although they do have similarities in their blending of forgotten history, secret realities, hidden magic and family obsessions. Nor do you need to read one to enjoy the other.

But both stories have the same origin. Or at least the same originator, the demon prince Althacazur and his endless and frequently appalling attempts to keep his eternity from being boring. Althacazur turns out to be the ‘man’ behind the curtain, rather like the Wizard of Oz, only Althacazur is a real magical being with all too real and horrific powers.

I want to say he’s not important – and he’s not important to what makes this story compulsively readable and so much fun. So even though the events are all his fault, he’s not all that important in the grand scheme of things, as contradictory as that seems.

What makes this story work is its combination of Christopher’s obsession to learn what the mysteriously missing Gemma Turner has to do with the sad progress of his mother’s life, set against Gemma’s story of taking control of her own destiny in a way that would not have been possible in the time and place to which she was born.

Christopher’s story is a story about hunting down clues, investigating theories, and giving over his own life in the present to solve a mystery in the past. Gemma’s story is about learning to make lemons out of lemonade and accepting that even if she can’t go home again, she can make a home where she is.

That Christopher’s solution to the mystery takes him down a road that runs more than a bit parallel to Outlander isn’t exactly a surprise by the time he gets there. But it does make for a fitting and delightful end to a lovely twisty turny story.

Which now has me more than a bit curious about the author’s first book, A Witch in Time, and whether Althacazur has been entertaining himself with humans even more than we’ve seen in The Ladies of the Secret Circus and The Star and the Strange Moon. I’ll have to find out while I wait for the author’s next book to magically – or demonically – appear!

Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Echo of Old Books by Barbara DavisThe Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: books and reading, historical fiction, historical romance, magical realism, mystery
Pages: 443
Published by Lake Union Publishing on March 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.
With no trace of how these mysterious books came into the world, Ashlyn is caught up in a decades-old literary mystery, beckoned by two hearts in ruins, whoever they were, wherever they are. Determined to learn the truth behind the doomed lovers’ tale, she reads on, following a trail of broken promises and seemingly unforgivable betrayals. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the nearer she comes to bringing closure to their love story—and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

My Review:

Instead of Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Echo of Old Books is a tale of Four Tragedies and an HEA – at least – and on both counts. The story folds together the bitter and the sweet into a saga that begins in mystery, middles in anger and ends in hope while it puts the readers, both of the story and within the story, through a wringer of emotions, keeping them turning the pages of not just the book in hand, but of the two mysterious books within.

It all begins with Hemi and Belle and the two seemingly anonymous, most likely privately published books that hold their separate perspectives on their clearly doomed, inevitably tragic WW2-era romance. But those little books are only the beginning of the web that has been woven.

A web that catches rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer within its sticky strands. At first, she is snared by the emotions that she can feel pouring off the pages. And then by the mystery of how these two books came to be.

She knows, with her gift of psychometry, that the emotions held within the pages are real – but can’t be certain whether the story told within is the true story of the seemingly star-crossed lovers or merely a fiction intended to conceal a deeper emotional truth.

As she reads, and as we read with her, she also becomes caught up in the puzzle of it all. Were Hemi and Belle real? If so, who were they? And how far will she need to travel in order to learn that truth?

Her search takes her to an intrepid librarian who ferrets out much of the historical data with a twinkle in her eye and a spring in her step. But the real treasure trove of information comes from Ethan Manning, who brought the books – along with many other considerably more mundane works – from his late father’s library to the used bookstore where Ashlyn first encountered Remembering Belle and Belle’s response in Forever, and Other Stories.

Together they read the story of his great-aunt Marian (nicknamed Belle in the books) and the love of her life. Whoever he was and however he broke her heart – just as she broke his. Along the way, they learn more than either of them wanted to know about a past that STILL isn’t quite dead.

And discover that the tragedies locked in their own pasts do not mean that they can’t find a brighter future, if they can just manage to paradoxically, let it go.

Escape Rating A: I’m pretty sure I initially grabbed this for the cover. Because books. Seemingly endless stacks of books. I couldn’t resist the story even if I can now manage to walk out of a bookstore without carrying stacks of books out with me, if only because text is hard these days and ebooks are much easier to read and to carry.

Howsomever, I moved this book to a bit earlier in the week for two reasons. One, I was hoping for an unequivocal happy ending, which wasn’t possible in some of this week’s books and seemed disappointingly out of reach in yesterday’s.

But even if this did not turn out to have a happy ending I could tell that it was at least going to have a cathartic resolution of some kind. Even if that resolution was bittersweet or downright sad. I needed something definitive, and I most definitely got it in this absorbing, compulsive page-turner.

I got all of that and more in The Echo of Old Books.

This is kind of a timeslip story, and it’s also more than a bit of a treasure hunt story. And appropriately, it’s the timeslip, the story within the books themselves, that grabs both Ashlyn and the reader first. So the story of Belle and Hemi dominates the early parts of the narrative in a way that is both clever and absorbing.

We also start out Belle and Hemi’s story knowing it’s going to be tragic, so it’s not exactly a spoiler that their 1941 idyll gets, well, spoiled. What we, and Ashlyn, are desperate to learn is how. And the way that the story spools out, at first being a whole lot of Belle and Hemi with only hints of Ashlyn, carefully shifts over the course of the story to less and less of the past – even as it gets more searing and races towards its seemingly inevitable denouement – and more of Ashlyn and now Ethan’s presents.

And their own searing, scarring pasts. The more we learn about both couples, the more we hope for HEAs all around – no matter how impossible that might seem. We become invested in both stories every bit as much as Ashlyn does Belle’s.

The Echo of Old Books was absolutely the right book at the right time for this reader, with its combination of historical mystery, tragic romance and historical ambiance both in Belle and Hemi’s 1941 and Ashlyn and Ethan’s “present day” of 1984.

I’m definitely going to be snapping up this author’s next book as soon as I see it. In the meantime, I’ll be picking up a copy of her next most recent book, The Keeper of Happy Endings, for the next time I need a book with an absorbing puzzle, a bit of an ugly cry in the middle, and satisfying, cathartic resolution with hopes of an HEA to keep me turning pages until the heartstopping end.

Review: The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Crane Husband by Kelly BarnhillThe Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, magical realism, retellings
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

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.

My Review:

There is a group of tales in Japanese folklore about a crane who returns a favor to a man. The best known of those tales is The Crane Wife. This story isn’t exactly that one for any number of reasons, quite possibly the least of which is that in this case it’s the husband who is the crane. The question of whether this crane husband is or is not returning anything remotely like a favor to the woman who makes herself his wife is open to one hell of a lot of questions.

Questions that her teenage daughter is left behind to answer – after her mother flies away.

The story in The Crane Husband perches almost gracefully at the sharp, pointy end of the pyramid between magical realism, fantasy and horror. Alternatively, it’s just plain horror about a teenager coping with too many adult issues by processing them through mythmaking.

Or both.

On the surface, it’s the story told by a nameless teenage girl as she watches her mother become enraptured by a crane who turns into a man in the dark of night. Her mother, an artist who has always seemed to be barely in touch with the real world, gives her every waking attention and her every thought and care to her crane husband. She turns so deeply inward as well as orients so totally on the shapeshifting crane that she stops doing any of the tasks necessary to keep their tiny household barely afloat.

Her daughter does her best, just as she has been doing since her father died, to manage the sales of her mother’s stockpiled art – of which there is little – as well as managing the food and the finances in general just to keep the lights on and to keep both herself and her little brother fed and clothed and sent to school.

Even as she watches her mother self-destruct. Until the girl finally comes to the pragmatic and necessary conclusion that her mother can’t be helped and that she herself is probably too damaged to save but that her adorable, winsome, six-year-old brother still has a chance.

If she acts before it is too late for them all. Unless it already is.

Escape Rating B+: The story on the surface may or may not be the real story, and that’s the part that keeps the reader guessing – or at least kept this reader guessing – even after the last page was turned.

It could be myth coming to life, meaning that the surface story is the true story. That her mother gave herself over to the crane in the hopes of finding a magical escape from the farm and the children that she should have taken long ago. And can’t resist now that she has found another way.

Very much on my other hand, this is also a story about a teenage girl keeping her family together in the face of her only remaining parent’s criminal neglect. While she is stuck watching her mother’s abuse at the hands of a charismatic and dangerous man who will certainly turn to her once he tears and beats her mother into an early grave.

That the girl turns to the language of myth to tell the story to herself as a coping mechanism would be as reasonable a solution as anything can be in the situation she’s enduring. Especially as the version we’re reading is the version she’s telling herself twenty years after her mother left. Or died.

Or turned into a crane and flew away.

Whether her story is an exercise in rationalization, a tale of outright horror or something in the middle haunts the reader as the tale draws to its conclusion. Along with the now adult girl’s still plaintive search for the brother she failed to save after all.