The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness
May. 14th, 2013 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
One night, George Duncan – a decent man, a good man – is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed.
The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George’s shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for him, especially when she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story …
Wise, romantic, magical and funny, The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and redemptive power of love.
George Duncan is an ordinary bloke and nice guy. A middle-aged divorcee, he runs a failing print shop with the help of mouthy Mehmet (who really wants to act) and makes unsuccessful art using broken old books. His life changes the night he’s woken by a strange cry and finds a crane in his garden with an arrow through its wing. He frees the bird and watches it fly away. And that should have been the end of it. But the next day a mysterious Japanese woman arrives in his shop. Her name is Kumiko and she’s about to change his life …
Multi-award winning children’s and YA author Patrick Ness turns to adult literary fiction in this deft but slim tale that draws on Japanese folklore. It’s an interesting book that works better in some respects than others and while it kept me turning the pages, it’s not particularly deep or meaningful and the central romance (and the reason for its failure) never really came off the page for me. It’s worth a read, but I must say that to date, I prefer Ness’s children’s and YA work.
My big problem with the book is actually George. Ness feels the need to constantly tell the reader what a nice guy he is and how he’s never quite come up to snuff for the women in his life. To me, he seemed to have a lot of unmerited expectations and the revelation about one relationship throws his nice-guy image into doubt. I also never believed in his relationship with Kumiko who is nothing more than a cypher for the purposes of this story and never becomes a character in her own right.
Saying that, I did love the sections that depict the crane’s history with the volcano and I also liked George’s daughter Amanda, a woman who doesn’t understand why she feels so angry all the time and pushes away those who she loves. There’s also a lot of humour in the book with some great one-liners that help offset the effect of some genuinely emotional scenes.
All in all it kept me turning the pages and I did enjoy it but (for me) it didn’t pack the punch of his children’s and YA novels so although it was an interesting read, I didn’t find it a great one.
The Verdict:
Multi-award winning children’s and YA author Patrick Ness turns to adult literary fiction in this deft but slim tale that draws on Japanese folklore. It’s an interesting book that works better in some respects than others and while it kept me turning the pages, it’s not particularly deep or meaningful and the central romance (and the reason for its failure) never really came off the page for me. It’s worth a read, but I must say that to date, I prefer Ness’s children’s and YA work.
Thanks to Amazon Vine for the free copy of this book.
One night, George Duncan – a decent man, a good man – is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed.
The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George’s shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for him, especially when she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story …
Wise, romantic, magical and funny, The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and redemptive power of love.
George Duncan is an ordinary bloke and nice guy. A middle-aged divorcee, he runs a failing print shop with the help of mouthy Mehmet (who really wants to act) and makes unsuccessful art using broken old books. His life changes the night he’s woken by a strange cry and finds a crane in his garden with an arrow through its wing. He frees the bird and watches it fly away. And that should have been the end of it. But the next day a mysterious Japanese woman arrives in his shop. Her name is Kumiko and she’s about to change his life …
Multi-award winning children’s and YA author Patrick Ness turns to adult literary fiction in this deft but slim tale that draws on Japanese folklore. It’s an interesting book that works better in some respects than others and while it kept me turning the pages, it’s not particularly deep or meaningful and the central romance (and the reason for its failure) never really came off the page for me. It’s worth a read, but I must say that to date, I prefer Ness’s children’s and YA work.
My big problem with the book is actually George. Ness feels the need to constantly tell the reader what a nice guy he is and how he’s never quite come up to snuff for the women in his life. To me, he seemed to have a lot of unmerited expectations and the revelation about one relationship throws his nice-guy image into doubt. I also never believed in his relationship with Kumiko who is nothing more than a cypher for the purposes of this story and never becomes a character in her own right.
Saying that, I did love the sections that depict the crane’s history with the volcano and I also liked George’s daughter Amanda, a woman who doesn’t understand why she feels so angry all the time and pushes away those who she loves. There’s also a lot of humour in the book with some great one-liners that help offset the effect of some genuinely emotional scenes.
All in all it kept me turning the pages and I did enjoy it but (for me) it didn’t pack the punch of his children’s and YA novels so although it was an interesting read, I didn’t find it a great one.
The Verdict:
Multi-award winning children’s and YA author Patrick Ness turns to adult literary fiction in this deft but slim tale that draws on Japanese folklore. It’s an interesting book that works better in some respects than others and while it kept me turning the pages, it’s not particularly deep or meaningful and the central romance (and the reason for its failure) never really came off the page for me. It’s worth a read, but I must say that to date, I prefer Ness’s children’s and YA work.
Thanks to Amazon Vine for the free copy of this book.
