The chief characters, three crows, equivalent of young teens, are easy to identify with, as they are intelligent bipeds. It’s a bloody tooth-and-fang account, suspenseful as a murder mystery. The story is an adventure, with twists and turns, loveliness and hard cold reality, displacement, realpolitik, betrayal, coup plotting, loyalty, and alliances. Monninger spins the fable in the best tradition of that form.
You trust him not to disappoint, and he meets your expectation. You settle into his prose as you would with a favorite coffee mug in hand the writing is solid, comfortable, and relaxing. His storytelling ability makes the fanciful a palpable reality, so the reader glides into the imagination as smoothly as, well, a crow alighting on a branch. Joseph Monninger, in his novel, A Crow’s Wisp, manages the artful turn of giving the slippery crow a graspable crowsonality, without anthropomorphic tropes. They are a trickster, a smart aleck, feared as the souls of people who had committed suicide, and harbingers of luck, good and bad. In the many Native American Crow Clans– Chippewa, Hopi, Absaroka, Tlingit, Pueblo, and many more tribes-the crow culture connects the past with the present and the future.Ĭrows have the reputation for being gossipy, disobedient, curious, cautious, a bit stubborn, and want the world the way they want it. For the ancient Celts, Romans, and Greeks, the crow could foretell the future.
In China and Japan, crows are divine messengers, who show love and gratitude. In the Bible, the crow symbolizes divine providence. The crow has been a constant in eons of history, and a continuous thread through worldwide mythologies. Reviewed by Steve Foehr (Ethiopia 1965-67) By Joseph Monninger (Burkina Faso 1975-77)
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