Every now and then an author comes into my life and I feel an immediate kinship with their writing. The minute I finished Ray Nayler's excellent novel, The Mountain in the Sea, I knew I was going to be invested in his career for the long haul. Lucky for me, that investment has paid off with his new novel, Palaces of the Crow.

Ray Nayler occupies an incredibly unique niche in modern literature, in that prior too his career as a novelist, he was an incredibly accomplished environmentalist and conservationist, working in the Peace Corps and as the international advisor for the Marine Protected Areas Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As you might expect, he brings that experience with him into his writing. Where The Mountain in the Sea tackled the intersection of human, animal, and artificial intelligence, Palaces of the Crow sees Nayler diving into the past and confronting the horrors of World War Two.

In short, Palaces of the Crow is about a group of young people in Eastern Europe hiding in the forest from the Nazis and their adjacent evils. Where Nayler's environmental background comes into play is the relationship that this group has with the population of crows living above them in the trees of the forest. While the humans try to stay alive, they develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the birds, with the murder of crows above them at times fending off invaders or even warning the group of oncoming danger.

Frankly, I am still unpacking everything that happens in this novel. There are some more obvious themes explored that come with the territory of fiction about World War Two, but there is so much more beneath the surface that deserves examination. As the human world is plunged into darkness, the world of the crows carries on at least partially oblivious to the chaos beneath them. As the years go by, the population morphs and changes with continual cycles of life and rebirth. However, as time progresses for both the humans and the birds, there are echoes of the past that persist and refuse to die. Whether it be the destructive nature of our species or the behaviors and idiosyncrasies of the birds of yesteryear, the book shows that the past is never entirely forgotten, for better or for worse.

Some books are easy to talk about, and others (like this one) feel like a challenge to accurately portray in a small essay like this. What I will say is that this book is beautiful, dense, smart, and hauntingly tragic. There are some moments near the end of the novel that had my jaw on the floor, and I imagine you'll react similarly. Nayler's writing deserves to be read slowly, and although Palaces of the Crow is not exactly a fun summer blockbuster, I think you will find that if you decide to go on this journey, you'll be thinking about it for weeks, if not months afterward.

5/5 stars for me, and I can't wait to dig into the rest of Ray's catalog.