Song of the Crow Book

From the moment he first looks down upon the ancient gray head of Noah, who is swinging his stone ax and speaking to the heavens, the narrating crow in this unique and remarkable epic knows that these creatures called Man are trouble. He senses, too, that the natural order of things is about to change. There is too much death and too much magic in the Songscape for the world to remain as it is for much longer. The people who come to plead with Noah are all angry or frightened. And why would this lanky old man-beast build this oddly shaped home--this "ark"--so far from the waters if something earth-changing were not coming? At a time when many of us are searching for meaning, Layne Maheu's extraordinary debut novel asks us to linger in a masterfully rendered ancient world just long enough to ponder the unsettled state of things. Through a truly poetic sense of language, he has created a lyrical meditation on the relationship between humanity and the heavens. Song of the Crow is a provocative portrait of the reasons for human fear and of the role that free will always plays when we struggle, not just to make sense of things, but to endure. Recalling both the magical imagination of Richard Adams's Watership Down and the spiritual richness of Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, Layne Maheu's Song of the Crow is a soaring debut.

Publishers Weekly

In a surprising take on the tale of Noah's ark and the flood, Maheu's beguiling debut unfolds from the perspective of a crow. The crow-narrator (named "I Am") first spies Noah (the beastman) from his nest in a tree (the Giant) that Noah is trying to chop down. From the start, I Am does not trust or understand the Man who lives in the "underworld." As I Am grows up, orphaned by his parents, his survival is a daily challenge: he flies to elude predators and rummage for food, often with another bird called Plum Black, sometimes consulting with elder Old Bone. I Am soon discovers that he can recognize the words of the God Crow, who speaks to Noah with zeal and commands him to continue building the ark. Suddenly, I Am realizes that he can also understand human speech, and eventually, just before the floods, he sneaks onto Noah's ark. The names sometimes confuse, but Maheu's fable works beautifully, probing the relationship between creatures of the heavens and those of the underworld. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.