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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Catching Teller Crow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Grief
Abuse of Power, Racism, and the Law
Storytelling and Truth
Time
Female Friendship
Summary
Analysis
Beth’s dad looks awful, “a pale shell.” Though Beth no longer appears in reflective surfaces, her dad says she looks the same: blue-eyed like him, black-haired and brown-skinned like her mom. Beth and her dad walk up a hill. Dust covers Beth’s dad but not Beth’s yellow dress, identical to the day she got in the car with Aunty Viv. The hill looks over a town; when Beth points out that her dad won’t solve the crime up here, he says he misses her. Beth reassures him, but she knows her current state—a ghost since another car rammed Aunty Viv’s—isn’t what he wants.
By comparing her dad to a “pale shell” of his former self, Beth suggests that his grief at her accidental death has faded and hollowed out his once-strong personality. Unlike her dad, Beth looks the same as before she died, right down to the yellow dress she was wearing. Yellow seems like a happy color, suggesting that Beth was a joyous girl—but Beth’s inability to change the clothes she died in suggests that death has artificially frozen her personal growth.
Themes
Beth has all physical sensations except touch. She didn’t guess death would be like this: she’d expected her mother, who died when she was an infant, to greet her on “another side,” the way her mother’s sisters, Aunty Viv and Aunty June, always suggested. Beth predicts she’ll reunite with her mother in the future, but right now she’s marking progress not by time but by whether her actions help her dad: “As my Grandpa Jim had once said to me, Life doesn’t move through time, Bethie. Time moves through life.”
Beth has good reason to travel to “another side,” an afterlife beyond the physical world: she suspects her mother might be there. On the other hand, she has good reason to haunt the physical world: she wants to aid her grief-stricken father. Beth’s grandfather’s saying about time and life suggests that the “right time” for Beth to move on wasn’t necessarily immediately upon her death—but that perhaps when or if her circumstances change, it may become appropriate for her to leave her father behind.
Themes
Beth urges her dad to start investigating the town. He says that’s what he’s doing—trying to grasp what the place is like. It reminds him of his and Beth’s mom’s hometown, a place where police officers have outsized influence. Beth infers that her dad is dwelling on bad memories of his own father, a local police officer who used the law to persecute Aboriginal people and disowned Beth’s dad when he started dating Beth’s mom, an Aboriginal woman.
When Beth asks whether the police here will be like her grandfather, her dad says he isn’t sure—things have been getting better, incrementally—but the case may not be worth his time. This troubles Beth, who wants her dad to focus on work so grief doesn’t overwhelm him. She reminds him that an unidentified corpse was found in the “children’s home” that burned down, though the children survived.
Though Beth is the one who died, she is focused on taking care of her miserable father rather than figuring out her own predicament. This dubious role-reversal—in which the adolescent child takes care of the parent—suggests that grief has rendered Beth and her dad’s relationship psychologically unhealthy.
Themes
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Beth tells her dad he should wait until the corpse has been identified to decide about the case. Her dad retorts that it was probably either the director of the home or the nurse, the only two adults who lived there—more likely the nurse, because the nurse and the corpse are both tall. When Beth asks what happened to the director and questions whether the fire was accidental, her dad claims the case is negligible: he’s only there due to Oversight, a program requiring seasoned detectives to review all potential homicides. Privately, Beth thinks that her father is there because his boss Rachel knows he’s grieving and wanted to give him an easy job. She thinks hard work would be better for her dad, though.
Beth’s dad’s boss is trying to give him easy assignments, which suggests that his grief appears obvious and potentially debilitating to outside observers. This is another sign that his grieving process isn’t going well, despite the help he’s getting from Beth, the very person he’s grieving. It remains to be seen whether Rachel is right that he could use an easy job—or if Beth is right that hard work will help him.
Themes
Beth’s dad’s phone rings, but he ignores it. Beth guesses it’s one of her mom’s siblings; they want her dad to reconcile with Aunty Viv. Beth reminds her dad that she died because another driver skidded during a rainstorm, not because of anything Aunty Viv did, and tells him he’s being unjust. Though her dad ignores her, she suspects he knows she’s right.
Beth’s dad seems incapable of moving past irrational anger at Aunty Viv for a tragedy that, as Beth and others make clear here, wasn’t her fault—another sign that his grief over Beth’s death is psychologically unhealthy.
Themes
Beth remembers when Aunty Viv came to her dad’s house, knocked hard on the door, and yelled that she wished she were dead instead of Beth. Her appearance shocked Beth: Aunty Viv, who loved bright clothes and nail polish, was wearing an “old grey tracksuit” and unpainted nails. Though only Beth’s dad can perceive Beth’s ghost, Beth tried to talk to Aunty Viv, telling her that Beth didn’t wish she had died and that her children needed her. After a while, Aunty Viv’s despairing tears—so reminiscent of Beth’s dad’s—panicked Beth, and she shouted that she couldn’t be “the reason anyone else falls apart!”
Aunty Viv’s name may remind readers of “vivacious” and “vivid,” words suggesting liveliness and brightness. The “old grey tracksuit” she wears after Beth dies represents how grief has dulled and warped her vivacious personality, which was symbolized by the bright clothes she loves. Beth panics at Aunty Viv’s claim that she wishes she had died instead of Beth, which underscores that both Aunty Viv’s and Beth’s dad’s reactions to Beth’s death—“fall[ing] apart—are unhealthy and frightening.
Themes
Unexpectedly, Aunty Viv stopped crying and looked down at her tracksuit in surprise. She stood, called to Beth’s dad that if he wanted her, she’d be there, and walked away more confidently than she’d arrived. Beth believes that Aunty Viv’s “spirit” heard Beth yelling, even if Aunty Viv didn’t literally hear her. The next time Beth saw her, she was wearing “her favorite pink dress,” which reassured Beth.
The “old grey tracksuit” that Aunty Viv wears when passively suicidal with grief contrasts with the “pink dress” she wears after her “spirit” responds to Beth’s pleas not to “fall[] apart.” These two outfits set up a symbolic system in which gray represents unhealthy grief or trauma, while intense colors like pink represent psychological or emotional health and strength.
Themes
Beth wants her family to be all right, including her dad—and she wants him to reconcile with Aunty Viv. When she reminds her dad that her mom’s family lost her too—“more” than he did, because they can’t see her—her dad snaps that no one lost her “more” than he did and stomps away. Beth recognizes that he’s right: whereas her mom’s family remembers her joyfully, her dad is so focused on her death that it’s like he’s lost all his happy memories of her. Though annoyed at her dad’s attitude, Beth is at least glad she made him so angry that he’s not sad.
Beth’s dad lost her “more” than her other relatives because his memories of her are frozen, fixated on her death. By contrast, her other relatives have a fuller sense of what Beth’s life was, the happy parts as well as the sad. That Beth’s dad is fixated on her death, despite being able to interact with her ghost, suggests that Beth’s decision to haunt him (if it was indeed her choice to do so) until he heals from his grief may have backfired: her ghostly presence may be preventing him from moving on, rather than helping him.
Themes
