Crow Talk: A Novel

“Crow Talk is a many-layered story of grief and healing. Of lessons learned from solitude and nature.”

Heartbroken by the recent death of her father and further dispirited by the rejection of her master’s thesis, 26-year-old Mary Frances O’Neill—known as Frankie— has retreated to her family’s remote cabin in the forested shadows of Mt. Adams, Washington. Snugged up on the shore of June Lake the serene cabin seems the perfect sanctuary at a time when Frankie has lost so much.

Expecting to be alone at the lake Frankie is surprised when the owner of the neighboring cabin arrives with his wife Anne and their young boy. Despondent in the aftermath of her own losses, Anne, a music teacher, is also coping with her troubled son and a strained marriage. Born in Ireland, she longs for the comfort of the family she left behind. When she and Frankie meet at June Lake it results in a turning point for both of them.

Crow Talk, by Eileen Garvin, gets off to a lumbering start while Garvin hints at the backstory a bit too long before finally getting to the point. But about a third of the way through the pace quickens as key elements are revealed and readers are at last drawn in.

Frankie, a graduate student in avian biology, rescues an injured baby crow she finds near the cabin. Splinting the fledgling’s broken leg and caring for the small bird gives her purpose at a moment in time when she is struggling to make sense of things.

“The little crow stirred in the sink. The Popsicle splint scraped against the porcelain and there was a rasping caw of hunger that grew louder. Frankie turned from the moon and abandoned her sorrow. After all, Charlie Crow needed tending.”

Fascinated by birds since she was a little girl, Frankie relishes being at the lake surrounded by them, especially the crows. Using birds as metaphor the author skillfully weaves a story that parallels the lives of crows and their human counterparts. Though effective, the abundance of bird metaphor sometimes verges on sounding like a lesson in ornithology, as with the inclusion of passages like this:

“Corvus brachyrhynchos is a large, chunky, ebony bird whose feathers can appear purplish in strong sunlight. Bill and feet are also black in color and quite dexterous. The tail is fan-shaped when the bird is in flight. Often gregarious and curious, crows prefer diverse habitats: woodlands, farms, fields, lake shores, towns, and dumps. Range: Year-round in the contiguous lower forty-eight, summers across Canada, excluding coastal British Columbia.”

When Garvin writes more organically it is more lovely and tangible:

“More than one hundred crows perched on the low branches of blushing vine maples and feathery tamaracks, their ebony heads poking out as they called to each other. A dozen or more flew across the expanse of the clearing and back. They alighted on the ground in pairs and stalked in a close circle . . . a single crow lying prone with its twiggy feet poking in the air. The crows took turns descending from the trees, pacing the grass near the fallen crow, and flying back up to roost in the branches. The black jostling bodies crowded the trees ringing the meadow. Their voices rose and fell together in a sad and worrying way. Their cawing overlapped in a loop of call and response, the sound surging to a high point and then dropping as the birds landed and left in a regular rhythm.”

While there is much to be said for the compelling sense of nature that comes across so beautifully in Crow Talk, the telling of Frankie’s relationship with her parents, Jack and Judith O’Neill, is the heart of the novel. Frankie’s strong connection to her father and her ensuing grief when he dies is stunningly tender. The distant relationship with her mother is equally believable. As is often the case, the death of a parent reveals things previously unknown to their children, and Crow Talk does a remarkable job of exploring this realm of uncovered truths and describing the impact of revelations heretofore unknown.

Garvin impressively conveys the feeling of sadness and the deep sense of regret Frankie has after her father’s sudden death:

“So much to regret—not going home for the holidays. Not staying another day that Thanksgiving weekend. . . . She’d hug him and tell him how much she loved him one more time.

“But she hadn’t done any of those things. She’d gone back to Seattle and buried herself in responsibilities, real and imagined. Fall bled into winter and then spring. And one night last April, her brother called to tell her that jack O’Neill, their kind, incorrigible, irresponsible, and delightful father, was dead.”

Garvin’s gift of putting emotions into words brings her characters to life, especially Frankie as she comes to terms with her father’s death and his imperfections in life. Face to face with these realities Frankie also sees her mother’s actions in a different light. Crow Talk is a many-layered story of grief and healing. Of lessons learned from solitude and nature. Of a woman whose myopic childlike vision of the past evolves into a soaring, bird’s-eye view of the world.