9780399141294. Pre-owned: Good condition. Hard cover. Language: English. Pages: 288. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 288 p. The author of Sugar Cage and River of Hidden Dreams has created a tender narrator, Bird Jackson, through whose finely wrought voice we experience a fusion of myth and hard-core reality, dreams and daily certainties, and the journey of a young girl who forges a new idea of herself and, in the process, soars to meet the challenge of her name.
Starstruck by a dime-store picture of Jesus, Avocet Abigail "Bird" Jackson fancies herself "His girlfriend" and embarks upon a spiritual quest for salvation, even as the chaos of her home life plunges her into a stony silence. In stark and honest language, Bird tells the tragic tale of her father, a sweet-talking wanna-be country music star, tracks her older sister's perilous journey into womanhood, and witnesses her mother make a courageous and ultimately devastating decision.
Yet most profound is Bird's own story--her struggle to sift through the ashes of her parents' lives, her meeting with Miss Zora, a healer whose prayers over the bones of winged creatures are meant to guide their souls to heaven, and her will to make sense of a world where fear is more plentiful than hope, retribution more valued than love. . . .
