Sometimes, when the shadow passes over your life, when the barometer is falling and you need time to…  you just need time… you retreat. You go live by water — the ocean, the river. In the case of Crow Talk, a new novel by Hood River writer Eileen Garvin, the characters converge on a secluded lake at the foot of Mount Adams in Washington state.

Silence, nature sounds, birds. Mary Frances O’Neill, or Frankie, has retreated to her family’s small cabin at a resort on June Lake with her tattered copy of G. Gordon’s Birds of the Pacific Northwest. It was a gift from her father, long before. He has recently died and she is mourning his life and hers with it, and the changes brought to her family. But she is also mourning the demise of her career. Her once-admired academic adviser has scuttled it, firing her as his research assistant and distancing himself from work on her thesis. Still, she works at revising it, when she can tear herself away from the lure of the natural world that surrounds her.

It’s fall; vacation season at Beauty Bay is over. The only other cabin occupied at the resort is home to a couple, Anne and Tim Magnusen, and Aiden, their 5-year-old son who stopped talking two years before.

The dance of characters is intricate and measured in this fine novel. Frankie, quiet and inward, has a natural way of reaching Aiden when he appears unannounced at her cabin.

Anne, an Irish musician married to an American, is mourning, too: the senseless death of a close friend in Ireland. She is on the cusp of anxiety, worried about her son, who exhibits signs of autism; drifting away from her husband and his noxious parents; taking a break from teaching composition at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle; worrying about why she isn’t writing songs.

These two women, Anne and Frankie, form a tenuous friendship, one that neither of these inward personalities had sought. They bond over birds, and shared experiences, and the conundrum who is Aiden.

Three points of view weave through this novel, straightforward chapters about Frankie and Anne, and fey little fables about crows from Aiden. He may not be talking, but he is listening hard.

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Nature is a character, too, in this book, but in her sure-footed writing, Garvin does not let it overshadow the humans’ stories. A previous, best-selling novel, The Music of Bees, dealt with creatures most readers can relate to. Not so much crows, Garvin told me in an interview, although once the book was published, she says she began hearing all sorts of crow stories from readers.

In Crow Talk, pitch matters, especially to the finely tuned sensibilities of Aiden and Anne, and Garvin is a pitch-perfect writer.

Here’s Frankie, visiting a venerable old tree that had been scorched by lightning years earlier: “She leaned her head against the red trunk and breathed in the smell of warm cedar, sweet pine needles, and the petrichor of the approaching storm.

“The air grew cold and humid, but she didn’t feel it. She was cracked wide open like the tree. She only felt her grief colliding with the dam of her heart. It was unwieldy and untrustworthy, a wild and raging thing inside her.”

Frankie had been working on owls with her adviser, but she is interested, too, in crows. “A group of crows passed overhead — a cabal, a congress, a murder. Something about the way they flew pleased her, their wingtips spread like fingers, their squared-off tails. She couldn’t say why.”

Crows are, however, just part of the nature that Frankie observes and reveres. June Lake (there is a real June Lake, but this one is fictional) abuts a vast swath of nature where Frankie, “a child of the woods, a wanderer, and a bird listener,” has her being.

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Anne, meanwhile, sits “in the dawn light of the kitchen listening to the quiet, which was not the same thing as silence at all.” It is quiet at June Lake, a quiet cacophony of bird calls and falling rain and the shuffling of a black bear.

Later, when Anne regains her music, “it was exhilarating to become lost in the flow of writing again. But just as wonderful was knowing that source was there even when she wasn’t writing. That well, that reservoir, was deep within her.”

For Garvin, that insight — realizing that the well will always be there — is the ultimate cure for writer’s block.

Like her two women characters, Garvin describes herself as an introvert, “card-carrying.” The insight gained from inwardness helps her to group her characters, who move and grow within the constraints of their own quietness.

All her novels, including the upcoming Bumblebee Season, due to be published in 2026, have characters who deal with autism. Garvin wrote an honest, moving, and sometimes very funny book, How to Be a Sister, about growing up with her sister Margaret, who has profound autism. “All of my books lead back to my sister in one way or another,” she says. Crow Talk is dedicated to Margaret.

Garvin, 53, says she set the novel in 1998 for the simple reason that she didn’t want to deal with all the technology that has visited us since then, like cellphones. She was writing during the pandemic and found she enjoyed how problems were solved with things like pay phones and the U.S. Mail. The remoteness of Beauty Bay is iconic, too; there’s no way to reach the cabins except by boat.

Boats and water are actors in the climax of the novel, a cataclysmic storm that clears the air. The barometer rises and the characters are on a surer footing. This is a book where the resolution is so satisfying, so organic, so right. The characters make the effort of moving away from society, and it pays off. In remoteness, retreat, pulling away from the world, they find their way out.

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And the reader, satisfied on a very deep level, comes away replete with crow lore and Irish music and a true exploration of the strange, convoluted, essential journey of the human heart.