Parakeet
A Novel
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3.7 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
EDITORS' CHOICE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
"Miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting." —Lauren Groff, author of Florida
"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts." —Kristen Iversen, Refinery29
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.
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bertino (2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas) impresses with this dreamlike, sardonic novel about a woman questioning her impending marriage while processing the trauma of a terrorist attack. Holed up in a Long Island inn during the week leading up to her wedding, a 36-year-old woman, known only as the bride, is visited by her dead grandmother, a first-generation American, in the form of a parakeet. The bird commands her to find her estranged sibling, Tom, a successful and reclusive playwright. The bride attends Tom's play, titled Parakeet, which depicts a fictionalized version of an anti-immigrant attack on a coffee shop she worked in when she was 18 (the bride describes herself as appearing "ethnically ambiguous"; she is of Basque and Romany descent). Later, the bride is startled to see her mother in the mirror, and continues to be unsettled by her pending transition into the role of "wife" ("I get the sense that the number of people who are married is not equal to the number of people that give the institution much thought"). These thoughts lead to an affecting description of the bride's memory of being wounded in the coffee shop rampage. The bride's conflicted emotions come to a head as the novel builds to a satisfying end. Fans of Rivka Galchen will delight in Bertino's subtly fantastical tale. (Jun.)
