Fall in the Pacific Northwest brings the start of cooler weather, and often the closing of summer homes, but for Frankie O’Neill and Anne Ryan, the end of summer means the beginning of a new season in both of their lives. In Eileen Garvin’s novel Crow Talk, she crafts a story of intersecting lives, families, and species.
As a small child, Frankie spent her childhood summers in a caretaker’s cottage next to June Lake, nestled beneath Mount Adams. It was her father who first gave her a special field guide and who suggested she record her bird sightings on slats of the old hunting blind built by her grandfather. This fall, Frankie has returned to the place where she began, hoping to finish her Master’s thesis in ornithology. It was, in fact, in her first ornithology class, where she learned “the power of wondering, of seeking an answer beyond what was accepted as true.”
Frankie is searching for answers at the lake and within the birds that surround it. Up the trail from her house, also looking for her own kinds of answers, is Anne. A mother, wife, musician, and teacher of Traditional Irish music at the Cornish College of the Arts, Anne is struggling to keep her family together and learn how to care for her nonverbal son, Aiden.
When Aiden escapes his mother’s watch during a storm, he ends up at Frankie’s cottage. Although they do not speak, he is met with hot chocolate and the words of G. Gordon’s Field Guide to the Birds of the Pacific Northwest read aloud by Frankie. When the rain stops, he leaves, but he later returns with Anne following close behind this time. During this second visit, Aidan helps care for an adolescent crow with a broken wing; Frankie has rescued the crow from becoming an eagle’s snack. Anne is bewildered at the boy’s quiet attention to the creature, his ability to listen closely to Frankie’s instructions when he is usually unable to take direction from adults. The three quickly form a loving friendship.
The novel, told in chapters alternating between Frankie, Anne, and Aiden’s voices, encourages readers to consider how each one deals with the difficult relationships in their own families—punctuated by loss, addiction, and stilted communication. “Charlie Crow,” who only resides in Frankie’s home for a short while before his health returns, teaches the two women and child how to pay close attention, how to care for one another, and how to communicate in new ways.
Across fiction and nonfiction texts, readers are gravitating towards stories focused on the interactions between birds and people—and what we can learn from paying close attention to the world around us. Centre County readers might remember Remarkably Bright Creatures, the 2023 Centre County Reads selection, which explores the misconceptions we might have about animals and about one another through an octopus. Similarly, Garvin examines the ways that crows “talk” to one another, opening up possibilities for how we might broaden our own understanding of communication with those around us.
As tragedy strikes the island, they each learn how to start anew. With uncertainty comes possibility, Frankie reminds herself: “The strongest inquiries come from the questions we just can’t seem to shake.” She asks questions of the birds outside her door, how they communicate and ask questions of each other, in order to inform her ever-evolving research. Likewise, Anne continues to ask questions of Aiden, but now in ways he can understand.
A true page-turner, the novel’s interest with the seemingly small lives of two families makes for an exciting read, although one certainly punctuated with several nerve-racking and heartfelt moments. Garvin’s attention to detail and focus on the natural world encourages readers to participate in their communities and give grace to those around them.
Crow Talk carefully weaves together these characters lives with the hope of asking readers to consider how they might pay more careful attention to the human and nonhuman forces in their lives—to the songs of the crows, the tappings of a child, the needs of neighbors, and the grief of our family members. Birds, as G. Gordon explains, “will likely always remain a partial mystery to us,” and so too do the humans we find around us. Garvin asks us through her characters to continue studying the talk of crows and tuning into the lives of those around us, because we might find more in common than we think.