In ‘Crow Talk,’ Hood River author Eileen Garvin twines birds, writer’s block, and autism into a pitch-perfect story about the human heart

Eileen Garvin dedicated her new novel, “Crow Talk,” to her sister Margaret, who has profound autism. “All of my books lead back to my sister in one way or another,” she says. Sometimes, when the shadow passes over your life, when the barometer is falling and you need time to… you just need time… you retreat. You go live by water — the ocean, the river. In the case of Crow Talk , a new novel by Hood River writer Eileen Garvin , the characters converge on a secluded lake at the foot of Mount Adams in Washington state. Silence, nature sounds, birds. Mary Frances O’Neill, or Frankie, has retreated to her family’s small cabin at a resort on June Lake with her tattered copy of G. Gordon’s Birds of the Pacific Northwest. It was a gift from her father, long before. He has recently died and she is mourning his life and hers with it, and the changes brought to her family. But she is also mourning the demise of her career. Her once-admired academic adviser has scuttled it, firing her as his research assistant and distancing himself from work on her thesis. Still, she works at revising it, when she can tear herself away from the lure of the natural world that surrounds her. It’s fall; vacation season at Beauty Bay is over. The only other cabin occupied at the resort is home to a couple, Anne and Tim Magnusen, and Aiden, their 5-year-old son who stopped talking two years before. The dance of characters is intricate and measured in this fine novel. Frankie, quiet and inward, has a natural way of reaching Aiden when he appears unannounced at her cabin. Anne, an Irish musician married to an American, is mourning, too: the senseless death of a close friend in Ireland. She is on the cusp of anxiety, worried about her son, who exhibits signs of autism; drifting away from her husband and his noxious parents; taking a break from teaching composition at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle; worrying about why she isn’t writing songs. […]

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