The Life List of Adrian Mandrick
A Novel
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“With a birder’s eye for detail, White takes us on [Adrian Mandrick’s] painful, near death descent…[her] life-affirming conclusion reminds us that endangered species aren’t the only ones that need to change and adapt in order to survive.”—The New York Times Book Review
H Is for Hawk meets Grief Is the Thing with Feathers in this evocative debut novel about a pill-popping anesthesiologist and avid birder who embarks on a quest to find one of the world’s rarest species, allowing nothing to get in his way—until he’s forced to confront his obsessions and what they’ve cost him.
Adrian Mandrick seems to have his life in perfect order with an excellent job in a Colorado hospital, a wife and two young children he loves deeply, and a serious passion for birding. His life list comprises 863 species correctly identified and cataloged—it is, in fact, the third longest list in the North American region.
But Adrian holds dark secrets about his childhood—secrets that threaten to consume him after he’s contacted by his estranged mother, and subsequently relapses into an addiction to painkillers. In the midst of his downward spiral, the legendary birder with the region’s second-longest life list dies suddenly, and Adrian receives an anonymous tip that could propel him to the very top: the extremely rare Ivory-billed Woodpecker, spotted deep in the swamplands of Florida’s Panhandle.
Combining sharp, elegant prose with environmental adventure, The Life List of Adrian Mandrick is a poignant, engaging story that heralds the arrival of a new literary talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A drug-addicted anesthesiologist attempts to avoid his problems by chasing rare birds in White's somber debut. The title character, struggling with the self-perceived stigma of being only the third-best birder in North America, regularly abandons his patients and family to take off by car or plane in search of birds that have inevitably departed by the time he arrives. On one trip, he and a birder friend drive for more than an hour before realizing that they have left Adrian's wife, Stella, at a rest stop; on another, he cheats on Stella. When Adrian gets an email from a birder who claims to have seen a bird thought to be extinct deep in the swamps of Florida, he heads into the heart of darkness, and runs smack into his past. While White makes Adrian a complex and oddly appealing character, the other characters in the book, including his wife and kids, are shadowy figures. Too many of the incidents strain credulity, which might be easier to forgive in a more comic novel, but here they test the reader's patience in a story bent on exploring the roots of Adrian's psychological problems. Readers will wish for more birds and less brooding.
