Bird-Eyes
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the first Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction, Madelyn Arnold's Bird-Eyes is a powerful, searing novel of resistance and survival in a hostile world.
In 1963, being different can be illegal---as sixteen-year-old Latisha, a lesbian runaway, discovers when she is sentenced to treatment in the locked ward of a mental hospital for being "incorrigible" and a threat to society. Her best friend in the ward is Anna, an older deaf woman committed for depression. Although she's forbidden to communicate in sign language, Anna teaches Latisha and gives her a name: "Bird-Eyes." Their growing friendship and their alliance against the hospital oppression forms a bond that is the catalyst for Latisha's eventual act of defiance.
A brilliant novel of friendship and defiance, of passion and resistance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This first novel paints a strong portrait of the human spirit in rebellion against the mindless cruelty of "the system'' that seeks to crush anyone who is different. Arnold presents the world of back-ward mental patients in the 1960s through the eyes of Latisha, a 16-year-old lesbian ``incorrigible,'' who was brutalized by her father, introduced to heroin and prostitution by her lover and is taken advantage of by both men and women on the hospital staff. Latisha nonetheless reaches out to someone even more isolated than she. Anna is a deaf woman hospitalized for depression by her relatives, who are convinced that they have done what is best for her and who refuse to believe that her psychiatrist forbids her to communicate using sign language. Latisha teaches Anna to survive the inhuman hospital rules, while Anna provides Latisha with her first genuine, non-exploitive human connection. By and large, Arnold successfully manages the perspective of a 16-year-old with compassion and without sentimentality. The relationships in the novel are plausible, and the details of how mental hospitals were operated in the early 1960s frighteningly realistic. The novel's only real flaw is that it begins slowly and little in Latisha's early narration helps to build rapport with the reader.
