The Crane Husband

Probably more of a 3.5 but I'm rounding up.

This is a retelling of the Japanese folktale The Crane Wife and while I couldn't fully recollect what it was about, it is mentioned in this novella too, so that was a good way to refresh my memory. While the original is about greed, this novella deals with grief, loss, generational trauma, domestic abuse, and survival - and does it so marvelously in just 120 pages.

The writing is absolutely magical - very poetic and lyrical, giving it a fairytale feel, even though the content itself is absolutely horrific at times. We knows it's set in the American Midwest but there's not really a clear vision of whether this is the past or some dystopian future, or maybe a combo of the two. But the bleakness of the town, the numbness of drones monitoring the endless farmland, the daily grind of our narrator taking care of everything in her home as well as her mother and little brother while not even bothering about what it's going to her - it all makes for a heartbreaking but resilient tale of a young woman determined to protect her beloved brother and ensure that he is able to escape this cycle of abuse.

I'm not sure I completely understood every metaphor here, and the power of art and transformation while being an integral part here didn't really move me. What I loved was our unnamed narrator's relentless strength and selfless love and the ending was both bittersweet but hopeful. Just go for this short novella if you have some time and want to experience something which is beautifully dark and nightmarish but also full of love.