• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2023 January #1
  *Starred Review* In this chilling novella, a young teen girl fights to keep her family afloat. Her mother is an eclectic artist, making wondrous tapestries and mediocre artisan cheese on a farm that was productive in the days before the corporations and their buyouts and drones arrived. The mother's art is good, but ever since the the father died, the practicalities have fallen to the wayside. That's where Bruce, the teenage daughter disguised behind a formal voice and a too-adult sensibility, comes in. Bruce balances the books, makes the sales, pays the bills, and gets her brother to school. But the entire balance is threatened when her mother brings home a man-sized crane—and begins to grow distant, haunted, and thin. This dark novella is woven from threads of classic fairy tales of crane wives and men who turn into beasts, braided with the bleak sensibility of the midwestern gothic and the compelling determination of a young girl who needs to protect her little brother. It is a fast-moving, lush story that refuses to end neatly, a story of flighty mothers and the daughters who die a little keeping their families alive. Fans of fairy-tale retellings will eat this one up. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Kelly Barnhill is the author of the adult novel When Women Were Dragons and several middle grade novels, including the New York Times bestselling novels The Girl Who Drank the Moon, winner of the 2017 John Newbery Medal, and The Ogress and the Orphans. She is also the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, and has been a finalist for the SFWA Andre Norton Nebula Award and the PEN America Literary Award. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.