The Crane Wife

By: Patrick Ness / Narrated By: Jamie Glover

Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins

Soooo good, unBEARably good, outta this world good… until it goes off the rails…

Truly, author Patrick Ness had me at A Monster Calls; didn’t care what it was, I was positive it would be brilliant. That audiobook had me sobbing into tissues like crazy, and I pictured Ness weeping as he pounded out the ending on his keyboard.

I saw the contrary reviews for most of his other works, but gosh: I’m serious, I cried sooo much; surely the writing would be topnotch, emotionally-evocative to beat the band?

And oh how it was! Sometimes in our little audiobook club our dearest Maman will go full-bore Social Butterfly (The woman is vaaastly rich in friends—I mean, really, what are those?!), and it’ll be quite some time between audiobook chats. If my sister has finished the choice, if she’s at odds and ends, I keep an ear out for a grand Listen I can suggest to tide her over. And boy, for the first 2/3rds of The Crane Wife my fingertips were just twitching to send out the: OH MY GOSH! text, advising her to run like the wind and listen to it.

Seriously, an extremely lonely man who has very little to show for his 48-years, broken marriage, boring print shop, no friends, wakes to hear a desperate keening coming from outside, within the frigid night. He makes his way out and finds a suffering crane in his yard. Its wing has been pierced straight through with an arrow, it’s bleeding, and tho’ George Duncan desperately wishes to help it, it looks like he’ll have to watch it die instead. A lucky movement shifts the arrow, exposes a weakness in it, and George is relieved to find that he can break the arrow after all. And so he does; and so the crane is saved and set free.

Next day, he’s consumed by thoughts of the crane, this feeling that his life has been irrevocably altered, and his thoughts turn into cut paper, shaped and formed into the likeness of a crane. Soon, an enigmatic woman, Kumiko, comes into his print shop with a small travel case. Within are tiles of her own work, extreeeemely intricate cutting and shaping of feathers that only tell the whole story when George’s work is added to hers.

Smash hit with connoisseurs of art, with people who see their finished tiles, and who feel things so very deeply that they’re moved to tears.

George is smitten, and he can’t get enough of Kumiko, even tho’ she’s reticent to share all of who she is, her own story.

Gloriously written, inCREDibly well-narrated by Jamie Glover, someone I’ve not had the pleasure of hearing before, and wait, I’ll say it one more time: GLORIOUSLY WRITTEN with a weaving of day to day life, of love and loss, of feelings coming to the surface, tears needing to be shed; all whilst twinning with the Japanese tale of the Crane and the Volcano. SMASHING!

…untiiiiil… Ness has George do something so unbeLIEvably out of character, something I found to be repugnant. It was NOT a good choice by Ness, seemed like a cheap device to move the narrative to a showdown and tragedy. Yup, I could stand back, get distance from the story enough to see the move as a simple choice of writing but danged if I could NOT but help to find George despicable from thence on, to the point where I felt absolutely no emotional involvement in the last 1/3rd of the book (Which was also drawn out a weeee bit toooo long).

Booooo! What had me yammering excitedly to m’ husband turned into: Jeez, what an atrocity.

What a complete waste of Ness’ writing skills; what a complete waste of treMENdous narration by Glover. A story that was twisting and turning with such heart and such complexity of emotions, the weaving of several narratives with some well-drawn side characters, and an AWEsome myth? Just a pity.

I stayed with it until the end, until the final words, the thoughts of Ness himself where he gave how the inspiration came to be, and danged if I don’t find him eminently likable. I’d like to say that I’d LIKE to give some of his other works a shot (EsPECially as he gets superior narrators!), but seriously, I felt personally wounded by what he made George do, by what he set up as George’s motivations.

Yeh yeh yeh, when all is said and done, I’ve made it all about meeeeee. But, seriously? “I” do NOT want to feel SUCH disappointment again. So sue me…