Parakeet
A Best Book of 2020 at Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Refinery29
A Best Book of Summer at Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, Alma, Subway Book Review, and Lit Hub
A Best Book of the Month at Entertainment Weekly, Hello Giggles, and PopSugar
EDITORS' CHOICE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one. The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet? Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother. In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried. A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions. How do our memories make, cage, and free us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change? Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.
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Community Reviews
Can't believe I only discovered Bertino this year--now I know what I've been missing! "Parakeet" is a poignant, funny, and feminist novel about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, disappointing mothers, womanhood, friendship, marriage, and the nature of time. Bertino manages to artfully address each theme in a short, "Homeric quest to reclaim control over the heroine’s own life and sanity, drifting between misadventures in a semi-lucid dream state populated by hallucinations, body-swapping, and bird metaphors."
I highly recommend this book AND her newest novel, BEAUTYLAND, published in 2024.
Favorite line : “There have been several times in our friendship when Rose and I reached what I feared was its conclusion, when an important update to our subscription to each other had lapsed, and we either had to renew or face the tenuousness of our connection.”
Bertino writes beautifully.
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