• I received an ARC for this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review and I appreciate both your work and commitment to this project. The following opinion is my own and holds no major spoilers. •

• An Impossibility of Crows
• Kirsten Kaschock
• Rating: 5/5

“The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows.”

I like to say there are cooks and chefs in writing.

Cooks, who are there to make something to fill our starved minds of the same comfortable tastes, the familiar ingredients, sometimes with a promise of “come, you already ate this, but this one tastes much better because I made it!” But then, afterwards, the writing was fun and good and just enough and not too long after I’ll forget about it

And then there are chefs, cooking books whose prose and themes and feelings are born in a person who can turn all those into ingredients for a gourmet literary experience. The kind of reading it’ll keep coming back to you even days or weeks or years after you wrote it, and you probably will look for the same taste again and won’t find it anywhere else. And that’s both devastating and amazing.

Kirsten, dear, you’re one hell of a chef.

In this book we know Agnes, a scientist whose marriage and sense of motherhood are slipping through her fingers. In a desperate attempt to find a solution for her problems, she moves with her family to her childhood home where she begins an experiment: to raise a crow big enough to be flown. However, in her obsession and ambition, she fails to realize her life keeps crumbling apart in front of her eyes while her crow keeps getting bigger and out of control. On top of that, she needs to deal with layers of generational trauma imprinted in the house she grew up in in a narrative that makes us question what we are actually made for.

I could convince you to read this book with just the paragraph above, but there is something much deeper in the prose of this author that you won’t find anywhere else and this is the one thing that made this book one of my favorite reads ever. There, in her prose, the sentences don’t just say things, they sing. You’ll find the author keeps words hidden on purpose, creating both discomfort and multiple meanings in the text. It’s there, then you read it again and it means something else, something deeper and darker every time you repeat it in your mind.

At some point I told my husband that I felt like the author was writing in another language and then translating it in her mind for us to read. And then I realized she really was, for some types of violence are just like that: something you only recognise sometimes when you look at it twice.

I have a feeling I’ll keep this book in my heart for my whole life. And now that I had a taste of the ingredients in this one and I’m addicted to it, what’s left for me it’s to wait for Kirsten Kaschock to cook something else while I pick up some junk food.