Crow Children

When Ava and her mum move to Crawford, a town edged by a forest and with an industrial past, it’s meant to be a fresh start after the sudden death of her father. There’s a new school and new friends and they are living with Ava’s grandparents in a place where her mum grew up and where everyone knows them. But Ava is too weighed down by sadness to feel much hope, especially as her beloved Nana’s memory begins to fray with frightening speed.

The town itself is shadowed by a strange presence: murders of crows circle overhead, watching, waiting, and seemingly aware. When Ava meets Dustin Marr, a boy her Nana once babysat, she’s drawn into a series of eerie rituals involving the crows. These rituals promise impossible things, including a chance to restore her Nana’s memories. But nothing comes without sacrifice, and the one-eyed crow king, Corbie, forces Ava to confront just how far she’ll go for the people she loves.

Alongside the supernatural intrigue, Dixon weaves in a tender friendship with Robin, Ava’s talented, optimistic and emotionally complex neighbour, whose own losses and music offer Ava moments of connection and peace. The interplay between grief, memory, and the passing down of stories across generations is explored alongside a practical industrial outlook vs symbolic and pagan beliefs giving the novel a range of complex and emotional themes. The premise is rich, original and ambitious but it is sometimes hard to work out if the surreal elements of the crow scenes are symbolic, imagined, dreamed, or real which may well be the author’s intention, but does make some of the pacing in the middle of the story feel a bit uneven.

Overall though, Crow Children is an ambitious and atmospheric novel that blends grief, folklore, and the magic of memory in a haunting and heartfelt story. It will appeal to readers who are drawn to eerie and mystical stories.