Book Review: The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

The first bird you see in the new year sets the tone for the rest of the year. Margaret Renkl hoped for a crow, and I got a Jackdaw. I had to check what they symbolize: death and new arrivals, or we could consider their natural tendencies: intelligence, sociability, curiousness, and ingenuity. I don’t know what that should mean for the year to come, but I love watching Jackdaws play on the roof next building over. They love to glide down the snow-covered roof and then hobble back to the top and do it again.

The Comfort of Crows is natural musings collected into a book, reflecting on the author’s days on her grandmother’s porch and its weird flower that blooms once a year, if lucky, to the day her husband brought her an anniversary gift and her boys leaving home. Margaret Renkl reflects the rhythm of nature with her own, illustrating how she sees the world and how tied her life is to nature and her backyard with its wildly kept grass. This book was a sweet, comfy read that made me wish I didn’t live in the middle of the city center and that I didn’t exhaust myself with so many other things, keeping me away from the trails I used to walk thrice a week.

I find it hard to review this book without reflecting on my life and thoughts about nature because it is so tightly tied to personhood and its relation to nature. It’s beautiful how the author lets her love for butterflies and other critters define how she keeps her yard and speaks against pesticides and perfect lawns. Her environment is part of her and her family, reminding me how we as a species illusorily think we are separate from our environment. We are not. It defines who we are, even the words we use. It’s our legacy to preserve our world for generations to come, but I fear that we have created this materialistic hunger that is slowly killing our minds and bodies and the nature we rely on. The perfect lawns are a symbol of our demise. To keep them perfect, people use toxins that move into frogs, voles, insects, foxes, and even us—all this to preserve a social image we have created for control. I couldn’t help but feel the pain for our world in the book, yet, don’t get me wrong, while the author voices her opinion, this book is still a praise for life and nature and how the changing seasons are tied to our lives. The book is sweet and beautiful. It’s me who is being bittersweet here.

Nevertheless, it made me think. It made me want to be more tied to my environment and not once removed from it. This is our world. The jackdaws on the roof and I are made from the same atoms. We are tied together. Maybe they don’t predict my year to come. Maybe they do. But I do care for them.

Thank you for the beautiful letter for our world, Margaret Renkl. And thank you for reading the review! Have a beautiful day ❤

P.S. If I should have one critique against the book, it would be the discontinuity of the essays. They could have been more tightly together to make the story whole.