Crow Talk
By Eileen Garvin
Literary Fiction
Dutton
April 2024
Crow Talk by Eileen Garvin is centered on three souls finding their way out of turmoil. Frankie has been fascinated by birds, especially crows, since childhood. She was working on her masters in ornithology, studying spotted owls, with an esteemed University of Washington professor. But it went off the rails when he asked her to work for a colleague studying crows. He is making it more than difficult for her to earn her degree.
So Frankie, although it's late summer, heads to the family cabin on a lake at the base of Mount Adams. Situated near both Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens, Adams is in reality one of those perfectly shaped peaks that is seen from most of central Washington and parts of Oregon. Her late grandmother ran a little store there that she and her older brother worked at summers. The cabin is more home than the family home in Hood River, Oregon.
She thinks she is alone at the head of the remote lake, but one of the other cabins along that part of the shore also is occupied late in the season. It's the most opulent cabin, owned by a wealthy Seattle newspaper family. Anne Magnuson, married to the scion of the family, is there with her husband, Tim, and their five-year-old, Aiden.
Anne, a music singer, composer and educator from Ireland, is still recovering from the sudden death of her best friend. She should have gone to Seattle on a scholarship instead of Anne, so her dying back home hits Anne especially hard.
It's had an effect on her teaching and her parenting. Aiden has become more and more withdrawn. He no longer speaks, needs his calming routines and doesn't respond well to the old-fashioned disciplinary methods her in-laws are hounding her husband to use. Aiden has just had a meltdown that embarrassed his grandparents and father in public.
As Frankie, Anne and Aiden get to know each other, their friendships develop as the reader learns more of why and how each of their hearts broke. And as the novel progresses, the reader sees connections in the way the characters' families are similar. This adds layers of empathy to the way they regard each other.
Frankie remembers to quiet herself as she was taught when a child, to listen. It shows her ways the crows are communicating to each other and even to humans. Listening to themselves helps her, Anne and Aiden know where their own hearts belong. The ways in which they listen to each other strengthens all of them.
Garvin connects both the process of sharing writing by reading, and making music to its composing.
Journeys back to themselves are like quests in fairy tales, giving a magical overtone to their stories. Aiden's story is a fairy tale to himself. His mother recalls the tales she was told as a child about women and crows communicating. What Frankie sees crows do is ridiculed by an egotistical, close-minded academic.
Garvin, who is from Eastern Washington and now lives in Oregon, does a wonderful job of conveying what it is like at a Pacific Northwest mountain lake. A reader who knows any of them can smell the evergreens, feel the sun and slight breezes, and hear the water and the wildlife in Crow Talk.
To do so opens up the heart to enfold her characters, even the ones who may not seem terribly sympathetic.
The second novel this year that is set in a Washington state home in the woods is a winning, winsome tale of friendships, love, lost children and the power of stories. Like Bear by Julia Phillips, Crow Talk blends setting, strong characters and the desire to connect into tales that make meaning out of life.