How to make a bird
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
WINNER: 2002 QLD Premier's Literary Awards.
I'm not a bad person. I've simply come out of left field. I'm a stray and, anyway, whatever I am, I'm not it yet. I'm still becoming. In fact, I'd always believed that I was once a horse, because I loved to run down a hill. And Eddie was a fish. He was a swaggerer, if you know what I mean. Flimsy but loveable.
Mannie is searching for the thing she doesn't yet know, but it's like a runaway kite pulling her heart forward. So she's leaving home. She's heading for the city with nothing but a long red dress, a strong hunch, and an unknown address in her pocket. As the day turns to night, Mannie makes a lot of discoveries and not exactly the ones she planned to make.
With rare sensitivity, wisdom and humour, and a voice that's entirely her own, Martine Murray tells a bittersweet story about longing and losing and finding again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing with an unusual sensitivity and a poet's sensibility, Murray (The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley) details the tragedy-ridden life of 17-year-old Mannie Clarkeson. Her home becomes unstable when her theatrical and depressive mother runs off with another man ("She was always in a mood, she never just was; never just a plain clear sky, always weather changes slipping and rippling across her face"). Now Mannie plans to travel from her small Australian town of Castlemaine to Melbourne to visit her grandmother, then perhaps on to Sydney and Paris to find the freedom to strike out on her own: "I'd just float off, figuring that life would be better if I was a bird and not a girl with a bung leg and bad thoughts." Mannie has high hopes, but her past and the loss of her love interest weigh down her journey. Told in a sweeping and elegant series of flashbacks, this novel, first published in Australia in 2003, presents a delicate internal journey and a sophisticated meditation on the struggle to find wholeness in broken pieces. Ages 12 up.
