The Fate of Cranes – Jonathan Merican

3 stars

I’m in two minds with The Fate of Cranes. On one hand, Jonathan wrote some really compelling characters with realistic, deep emotions. On the other hand, the story itself dragged in several places.

Let’s start with the characters. Johnathan mastered the paranoid, distristful atmosphere that I would expect from a Soviet era setting. Vanya and Dima’s slowly deepening paranoia towards each other was so well-written and believable, especially once the thread finally snapped and paranoia turned into outright accusations.

However, the story itself seemed to drag. There were some super tense moments that would then get lost in a lot of exposition and it muddled the emotion for me. A couple of the flashback scenes, while certainly cool, didn’t necessarily add a whole lot and took me out of what was happening in the present. It made it hard for me to keep invested when the writing was already pretty exposition heavy in the first place without adding flashback time jumps.

The ending was really confusing to me also. I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from it or what the meaning of everything was. I feel like I had more questions without any way to get answers and it left me more frustrated than satisfied in the end.

Overall, it was an interesting read. I’m not real familiar with Soviet folklore and maybe that’s where my disconnect is, but I had a bit of a hard time with it.