Birdie and Me
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
* "Belongs alongside Holly Goldberg Sloan's Counting by 7s, Cindy Baldwin's Where the Watermelons Grow, and Ali Benjamin's The Thing about Jellyfish. Highly recommended."--School Library Journal, starred review
An emotional and uplifting debut about a girl named Jack and her gender creative little brother, Birdie, searching for the place where they can be their true and best selves.
After their mama dies, Jack and Birdie find themselves without a place to call home. And when Mama's two brothers each try to provide one--first sweet Uncle Carl, then gruff Uncle Patrick--the results are funny, tender, and tragic.
They're also somehow . . . spectacular.
With voices and characters that soar off the page, J. M. M. Nuanez's debut novel depicts an unlikely family caught in a situation none of them would have chosen, and the beautiful ways in which they finally come to understand one another. Perfect for fans of The Thing about Jellyfish and Counting By Sevens.
"A luminous debut."--Ashley Herring Blake, author of Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World, Stonewall Honor book
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nuanez's debut follows a long tradition of middle grade novels about children virtually on their own, navigating a world of imperfect adults. The children in question are narrator Jack, 12, and her brother Birdie, nine, a gender-creative, fashionably precocious kid whose Alexander McQueen inspired style is underappreciated to say the least in the tiny town of Moser, Calif. That's where the siblings end up, bouncing between their late mother's much older brothers after she dies in a somewhat mysterious car accident. Carl, affirming but unreliable, forgets to send them to school regularly, so they move in with responsible but stoic Patrick, who defends and respects Birdie in his own way despite his stern demeanor. Nuanez slowly unspools the circumstances surrounding Jack and Birdie's mother's death, working up to a revelation that feels both surprising and inevitable, and resists simplistic characterizations, slowly divulging both uncles' strengths and weaknesses with a well-paced, deceptively subdued plot. Sure-handed storytelling and choice details revealed through Jack's observation notebook mark a strong middle grade debut. Ages 10 up.)
