Raven Girl
*Starred Review* Following her eerie graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile (2010), multitalented Niffenegger returns to the elegant mode of her novels-in-pictures (The Three Incestuous Sisters, 2005; The Adventuress, 2006) in this by turns brooding and radiant modern fairy tale. A solitary postman serving a “desolate” outpost has nightmares about e-mail and fears he’ll never have an adventure. Then one fateful day he delivers a letter to a raven’s nest and finds a fledgling on the ground. He takes the little girl raven home; she matures quickly, relishing “television and junk food,” and they fall in love. Their egg-hatched daughter looks human, but she squawks instead of speaks, longs to fly, and confides, “I feel all wrong.” Away at college, she meets a plastic surgeon who thinks he can help. With her signature mordant wit, wry melancholy, and keen gothic sensibility, Niffenegger weds the fabulous with the deeply human in this concentrated, suspenseful fable of unlikely love, a struggle for selfhood, and a dramatic metamorphosis. Niffenegger’s prose is precise and stinging, her etchings shadowed and graceful, her spellbinding story suffused with implications. Created in response to an invitation to collaborate with London’s Royal Ballet, Raven Girl will take flight as a book and onstage. --Donna Seaman