Catching Teller Crow Themes

In Catching Teller Crow, trauma and grief paralyze characters, preventing growth and change. It is only by drawing on strong relationships with others that characters can move beyond their trauma and grief. This dynamic is clear in the interrelationships of Sarah Blue/Crow, Isobel Catching, Beth Teller, and Michael Teller. Crow is the ghost of a 14-year-old Aboriginal Australian girl, Sarah Blue, who was kidnapped, abused, and murdered by two older…

In Catching Teller Crow, racist power structures enable the abuse of Australian Aboriginal people, particularly girls—and while the law sometimes holds abusers to account, it often perpetuates injustice. From the late 1860s into the 1970s, the Australian government passed laws and policies encouraging the forcible removal of children from their Aboriginal families to facilities (or, sometimes, adoptive families) that tried to assimilate the children to white Australian culture. While the novel takes place after…

In Catching Teller Crow, linear clock-time is a misleading way of organizing reality. In the world of the novel, people should understand time as an index of their growth and progress: if they aren’t growing and changing, they aren’t really moving forward, even if the clock-hands keep ticking. This understanding of time is exemplified in Beth Teller and her father Michael Teller. Beth is a ghost, eternally 15 years old and always wearing…

In Catching Teller Crow, all positive relationships are important—but friendships between girls are particularly meaningful, because they help vulnerable young women fight back against gendered violence. The novel’s main villains, Alexander Sholt and Derek Bell, have been kidnapping, abusing, and murdering girls in the same small Australian town for about 20 years. They are finally stopped when their last victim, Isobel Catching, befriends the ghost of their first victim, Sarah Blue/Crow…