Title: The Cry of the Crow
Author: Jean Craighead George
Date: 1980
Publisher: Harper Collins / Scholastic
ISBN: 0-439-18811-3
Length: 149 pages
Quote: "The strawberry crop was coming on and Mandy's father wanted every crow dead before they ate or damaged the valuable fruits."
Mandy is the only one in her family who likes crows. She makes a pet of a baby crow left in a nest her brothers have blown up. Crows can be lovable pets--as cuddly as chickens, as clever as parrots, some say more intelligent than both together--and although Mandy might have a chance to send her pet off with a flock of wild crows, she can't bear to lose her crow forever.
Crows believe in blood feuds. Mandy is warned that her pet crow may remember who destroyed her nest and attack him when she sees him. She doesn't believe it, until...
Jean Craighead George was a naturalist, an uncompromising scientist, who happened to be fond of animals, tame or wild, and children. She wrote nice, happy stories about animals and children in as many different situations and relationships as she could honestly write, for many years. She was the author of many delightful stories.
This is not a delightful story. It's not only that the pet crow dies, at the end. It's how she dies. This is a horrible, sad, terrifying story, bitterer than Beyond Rope and Fence, more shamelessly tear-jerking than Old Yeller. The lesson was meant to be "Don't try to keep a wild creature as a 'baby,' as a pet, after it's old enough to go back to the society of its own kind." Because birds grow up quickly the lesson for young readers could easily be "Don't ever make friends with a wild creature," or even "Don't ever make friends with any living creature."
I recommend The Cry of the Crow to adult readers only. The young will find enough to cry about in Julie of the Wolves. The old, who expected one of Julie's human relatives to be the one to "rescue" her by killing her foster father, the wolf Amaroq, will still wince at the end of Cry of the Crow.
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