Eh. It was all right. No spoilers (none more than what’s on the jacket flap).

Mark Schluter crashes his truck off of a highway in rural Nebraska and ends up in a coma for 14 days. His sister, Karin, leaves everything behind to rush to his side and care for him. When he emerges from his coma, he doesn’t acknowledge her as his sister. He suffers from Capgras syndrome, a rare condition where a person misidentifies someone closest to him—believes that person has been replaced by an imposter, or robot, or alien.

A famous Manhattan neuropsychologist, Gerald Weber, is intrigued by the case and visits Nebraska to study Mark.

The book is largely about the dynamics of those three people. And cranes. The bird variety, not the construction kind. There’s a whole lot about cranes. More about cranes than any person might ever want to know.

There is an extended supporting cast: Daniel--the bird refugee enthusiast, Barbara—the mysterious nurse’s aide, Rupp and Cain—Mark’s witless buddies (who make brain damaged Mark look almost normal in comparison), Robert Karsh—the smarmy land developer, Sylvie—Dr. Weber’s wife, and then there’s a cryptic note written by an anonymous guardian angel. These people, along with the big trio, and the cranes, drive the book forward to try to untangle the mystery of what happened the night of the crash, since nobody witnessed it but the birds. It’s not a mystery though. The “mystery” is just the vehicle that moves the characters along to the end.

I did enjoy the neuropsychology parts a lot. But, that’s me. I have a degree in psychology and a minor in biology. At the time I was earning my degree, neuropsychology was a very tempting field for me, except for all the brutal and intense animal research. I was literally nauseated by the inhumane experimentation and the ruthless disregard for the animals in the field at the time, and that was enough to turn me away from pursuing that particular degree. But, the topic has always fascinated me—the intertwining of the brain and the mind and which is really in control.

I was sucked in by the different case histories presented. At one point, Dr. Weber is reflecting on phantom limb pain and how it used to be that the medical field dismissed it, telling the patient that their pain was all in their mind. And, he comments—as if there’s any other kind of pain. I found the neuropsych segments of the book worth the whole of it.

The cranes I could have done without. I skimmed a lot of the crane stuff. Yes, I understood the parallel between the cranes and the neuropsychology. I did understand the tie-in, I got the whole “co-dependency/interdependency/mythological symbolism” thing, but I found it very dreary and overbearing.

I also didn’t like the way the author seemed to kind of hate all of his characters. They were all unlikable in one way or another. For some of those people, he really had to work at bringing that element into their character. Some of the folks would have been just genuinely OK people—normal, likeable, regular folks. But, then he had to go out of his way to introduce some damnable fault. Look at them through someone’s eyes who saw something we’d missed before and now they were reduced and pathetic. I’m all for human characters, but I think his characters were human before making them say, or do, or be seen in such ways that made them become jerks.

I really can’t recommend it, but I wouldn’t NOT recommend it either, because there might be elements to it that someone else would like more than I did.