Crow Talk

Two women bond while staying on a remote mountain lake in Garvin’s touching if predictable latest (after The Music of Bees). Frankie, an ornithologist, is holed up in a small cabin in Washington State, unmoored by the sudden death of her father and her falling out with an adviser. Anne, a composer with writer’s block who’s on leave from the Seattle college where she teaches, is staying at her wealthy in-laws’ lake house with her nonspeaking five-year old son, Aiden. The two women forge a bond after Aiden, who is weary around most people, wanders into Frankie’s cabin and becomes fascinated with an injured baby crow she’s nursing back to health. In chapters told from alternating points of view, readers watch the women grow closer as each grapples with her personal problems. Though the various plot strands get tied up a bit too neatly, Garvin evocatively renders the beauty of the mountain landscape, and she excels at depicting the fault lines in her characters’ lives (“Nobody could tell you how to fix the errors in the composition of your singular family”). Readers in the mood for a happy ending will be carried away. Agents: Heather Carr and Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency. (Apr.)