"This poignant exploration of grief and the search for meaning rings with authenticity and mythic power."
Laying bare the rawness of grief, the unfairness of death, and a longing to find meaning in life, James Dixon’s Crow Children is a remarkably well-written novel. Boasting a beautifully lucid style, every word works wonders as it sees a girl navigate coping with the sudden death of her father while witnessing her beloved grandmother lose her memories.
Ava never got to say goodbye to her dad. He dropped down dead at work and that was that. Sometimes, this “made her shake with rage.” Other times, “she felt so incredibly unhappy. The sense of pointlessness weighed her down”. And so, Ava’s mum moves them to live with Ava’s Pop and Nana. While this was supposed to be a fresh start and Ava loves her grandparents, it’s beyond painful to see Nana losing her memories. At the same time, Ava is drawn to charismatic Dustin — a boy with wild connections to the woods, and to the crows her storyteller Nana has spoken of. In Nana’s words, crows “guide us to whatever comes next — heaven, the otherworld, islands in a vast sea…Though they demand payment for their services…They guide us in exchange for our stories, our memories”, for “our souls are in our stories”.
When Dustin invites Ava to join one of his rituals in the woods (“He belonged in this world, a world of dark words and old magic”), Ava is drawn into making an impossible decision — can she commit a sacrificial act of betrayal in order to save Nana’s memories?
Suspenseful and menacing, Crow Children is also incredibly moving as Ava finds a renewed sense of what it means to be alive through the rage of grief: “There was plenty out there worth living for, plenty of furious beautiful life blooming all around”.
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