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mishandthechicks's review
challenging
dark
emotional
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
marisazane's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Owen is born with a heart murmur so severe and baffling that doctors expect he might not live long and want to keep him in the hospital to run tests. His teen mom is terrified her son will be taken away, so she leaves the hospital, hoping to keep Owen under the radar at home. Within a few days, something happens that confirms for his mom she made the right move. A hole develops in Owen’s chest with a small bird inside. He’s a Terror - a person who hosts an animal in their body, and if one dies, so does the other. Owen’s mother knows it’s not safe for anyone to find out about the bird in his chest, ever, so she keeps him inside the house for years, not even letting him venture into the backyard. Owen only has his bird, Gail, to keep him company. One day when he’s older, Owen goes outside and isn’t immediately snatched by an army of police and doctors waiting to run experiments on him. He grows more curious about the outside world but runs into trouble when he has an asthma attack while exploring during wildfire season. His mom has no choice but to take him to a clinic for a breathing treatment, where his secret is discovered by a doctor who decides in an instant he wants to be known for exposing a Terror to the world. Owen escapes, and his mom drops him off at her brother’s house “for his safety” and leaves. He attempts to hide in plain sight as he enters his teen years. Never exposed to society before, Owen (and Gail) try to figure out where they fit in the world, who is a friend, who is dangerous, and if life is even worth living if you have to hide the literal core of your being.
—
This is a coming of age story about someone who feels so drastically different from everyone around him that he isn’t even sure if the world is safe for him. Sure, this could have been about a kid who feels like they don’t fit in for all the normal things we know of, but making his difference A BIRD IN HIS CHEST, where the reader has to suspend their disbelief, made the story so much richer. And even though Owen is a Terror, and his a bird in his chest, this book was so much quieter than I expected, and I loved that.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
—
This is a coming of age story about someone who feels so drastically different from everyone around him that he isn’t even sure if the world is safe for him. Sure, this could have been about a kid who feels like they don’t fit in for all the normal things we know of, but making his difference A BIRD IN HIS CHEST, where the reader has to suspend their disbelief, made the story so much richer. And even though Owen is a Terror, and his a bird in his chest, this book was so much quieter than I expected, and I loved that.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
batmanlover14's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
xyranys's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
msloan's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
mxmacalla's review against another edition
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
lmeneghin32's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Absolutely brilliant! One of the best books of fiction I've read in a while.
matthewkeating's review against another edition
2.0
Emme Lund's debut novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest, is a deeply ambivalent, sometimes-allegorical queer coming-of-age story. Owen Tanner has a hole in his chest: his organs (including his heart) have dutifully moved aside and around the hole to allow space for Gail, the talking java sparrow who lives inside his ribcage.
When Owen is born, there isn't a bird in his chest, but the hole there and the fact that he is alive in spite of it make him a prime target for study. Owen's mother, Janice, sees the doctors eager to study her son as greedy and inhumane, and takes her son home, where she hopes he will pass away in peace.
Instead, he continues to live, and several days later a baby bird appears in his chest. She's been there ever since. Janice is paranoid that her son will be stolen away from her to be experimented on, so she hides him away, and he spends his entire childhood and teenage years isolated from human contact. The story proper begins in Owen's teenage years, shortly before he is spirited away from his home and placed in hiding with his uncle and cousin. In the opening of the book, a flash-forward, Owen is on the road, hitchhiking towards the Golden Gate bridge, where he plans to end his own life.
The book's heart is (ironically) in the right place. There are some genuinely warm moments as Owen finds connections with new friends and family, and powerful ones when Owen feels visible: my favorite line in the book was Owen's triumphant "My name is Owen. I have a bird who lives inside my chest. She's always been there." Gail the sparrow, funny and caring - sometimes even maternal - gives the story life, and the story's magical elements are the most interesting parts. I don't doubt that this could be a meaningful journey for a young queer person, or for someone open-minded but naïve to the difficulty young queer people encounter in everyday life.
The writing, though, leaves a lot to be desired: it is repetitive and somewhat awkward, especially in dialogue, where a lack of contractions makes characters seem stiff and oddly formal (always "I am," never "I'm," etc.). In my experience, people simply don't talk this way. Certain stock phrases reappear too frequently. It seems questionable to me to bill the novel as literary fiction.
There's a lot to be said for the confusion between allegory and reality, too, because the book confronts Owen's navigation of queer young-adulthood simultaneously with his struggle to survive as a medical marvel, a person many would consider to be a monstrosity.
All of the action - the most compelling parts - takes place in the outer segments, probably the first and last fifths of the book. These are the sections that detail Owen's flight from Morning, Montana to his uncle's home in Washington, and later his attempt to escape Washington to go to California, where he plans to end his own life. These parts focus on the real danger Owen is in, of being captured by doctors or government officials - the people his mother refers to as the "Army of Acronyms" due to the abbreviated names of various medical degrees and government organizations. Then, in the bulk of the book, the focus is on Owen's queerness and his desire to find his identity; the threat of death and experimentation fade into the background, and the story's conflicts are suddenly literal instead of allegorical: bullying, young love, the desire to fit in, a backwards, small-town community that isn't accepting of LGBTQ folks. The result is a structure that feels split between Owen's typical teenage woes and actual threats to his life, and a middle section that feels incongruent and far too long.
Are the Army of Acronyms supposed to be taken at face-value - the doctors, government officials, and other cynical and menacing adults out to steal Owen away to experiment on him? It's unclear, because Lund also flirts with the idea of treating them metaphorically, a representation of all of the people who refuse to accept Owen (or queer people in general) for who they are. This makes the resolution to this arm of the plot even more bizarre: after the relentless anxiety Owen faces for the entirety of the book, the entire problem is waved away through a deus-ex-machina type solution that leaves the reader to wonder if the entire thing couldn't have been solved years and years ago. Owen can't figure out if Janice's incessant paranoia is justified, and Lund doesn't seem to know, either.
Owen's recurring obsession with the ocean seems to be another way to indicate his lack of belonging with the rest of the world. He has a dream of living in the undersea world of The Little Mermaid, essentially a tale about longing to be a part of a world inherently hostile to you and incompatible with your physical body. At times, the water and Owen's longing for it seem to be a kind of symbolic buzzword for his otherness. This makes it all the more confusing that The Little Mermaid's ocean doubles as Owen's planned method of suicide, leaving me confused as to what Lund is trying to say. When Owen turns away from his death at the Golden Gate Bridge, what, exactly, is he turning away from?
The thing I found most interesting in the story was Lund's very creative "terrors," the magical-realist construction of people who have animals living inside them. The idea is mostly used to suggest the idea of queerness - having to hide a real part of yourself from the rest of the world, etc. - but Lund also dips into talking about it more literally in the world she has created: these people are known to exist, spoken about online and in textbooks. Towards the end, another specific example is given: Owen reads about a boy with a cricket in his thigh. The interactions between Owen and Gail are so interesting, and feel magical and fantastic in the best ways. I would have loved to meet more characters like this - what would the cricket be like? How do others get along with the animals inside them? Since the boy and bird depend on each other mutually - if one dies, so does the other - there is plenty of room to discuss the implications of conflict between the creatures. I would have loved to read an underground magic story about these terrors, something in the vein of Gaiman's Neverwhere.
Owen meets two others like him, but never has any interaction with them. Both times Owen is in physical proximity to another "terror" are exciting and make us wonder what kinds of lives these people lead - but Lund doesn't follow through. I am certainly willing to believe this could be leveraged for some meaningful observation - the solidarity with the others that Owen feels, even though he never speaks to them - but I was instead left wondering, as I was many times, what exactly Lund was trying to achieve.
Owen's conflict with his mother Janice is particularly frustrating; he grows wary of her incessant paranoia and "crazy talk," but doesn't seem willing or able to think about his resentment for his mother until the very end of the book, where he confronts her. He tells her he's angry, and tells her plainly how he feels about the things she did; she apologizes tearfully and says she's not perfect. That's the end of that part of the conversation; then they talk about Owen's love life and laugh at a silly joke. Owen leaves to go do other stuff and doesn't really think about it anymore. The entire affair is another instance of Lund's apparent lack of conviction; for almost the entire book, Janice is built up as an unwittingly abusive mother, suffering from grievous mental illness and likely alcoholism, but in the end she is portrayed in an almost exclusively sympathetic light. I got the sense that it was Lund, not Owen, who was forgiving Janice for her treatment of her son.
The Boy with a Bird in His Chest tries to create a fantastical, magical-realist landscape in which to explore questions of identity and belonging. Unfortunately, it lacks commitment to its own ideas, and its mixture allegory and reality creates a confusion at odds with the message of confidence in oneself and one's identity.
When Owen is born, there isn't a bird in his chest, but the hole there and the fact that he is alive in spite of it make him a prime target for study. Owen's mother, Janice, sees the doctors eager to study her son as greedy and inhumane, and takes her son home, where she hopes he will pass away in peace.
Instead, he continues to live, and several days later a baby bird appears in his chest. She's been there ever since. Janice is paranoid that her son will be stolen away from her to be experimented on, so she hides him away, and he spends his entire childhood and teenage years isolated from human contact. The story proper begins in Owen's teenage years, shortly before he is spirited away from his home and placed in hiding with his uncle and cousin. In the opening of the book, a flash-forward, Owen is on the road, hitchhiking towards the Golden Gate bridge, where he plans to end his own life.
The book's heart is (ironically) in the right place. There are some genuinely warm moments as Owen finds connections with new friends and family, and powerful ones when Owen feels visible: my favorite line in the book was Owen's triumphant "My name is Owen. I have a bird who lives inside my chest. She's always been there." Gail the sparrow, funny and caring - sometimes even maternal - gives the story life, and the story's magical elements are the most interesting parts. I don't doubt that this could be a meaningful journey for a young queer person, or for someone open-minded but naïve to the difficulty young queer people encounter in everyday life.
The writing, though, leaves a lot to be desired: it is repetitive and somewhat awkward, especially in dialogue, where a lack of contractions makes characters seem stiff and oddly formal (always "I am," never "I'm," etc.). In my experience, people simply don't talk this way. Certain stock phrases reappear too frequently. It seems questionable to me to bill the novel as literary fiction.
There's a lot to be said for the confusion between allegory and reality, too, because the book confronts Owen's navigation of queer young-adulthood simultaneously with his struggle to survive as a medical marvel, a person many would consider to be a monstrosity.
All of the action - the most compelling parts - takes place in the outer segments, probably the first and last fifths of the book. These are the sections that detail Owen's flight from Morning, Montana to his uncle's home in Washington, and later his attempt to escape Washington to go to California, where he plans to end his own life. These parts focus on the real danger Owen is in, of being captured by doctors or government officials - the people his mother refers to as the "Army of Acronyms" due to the abbreviated names of various medical degrees and government organizations. Then, in the bulk of the book, the focus is on Owen's queerness and his desire to find his identity; the threat of death and experimentation fade into the background, and the story's conflicts are suddenly literal instead of allegorical: bullying, young love, the desire to fit in, a backwards, small-town community that isn't accepting of LGBTQ folks. The result is a structure that feels split between Owen's typical teenage woes and actual threats to his life, and a middle section that feels incongruent and far too long.
Are the Army of Acronyms supposed to be taken at face-value - the doctors, government officials, and other cynical and menacing adults out to steal Owen away to experiment on him? It's unclear, because Lund also flirts with the idea of treating them metaphorically, a representation of all of the people who refuse to accept Owen (or queer people in general) for who they are. This makes the resolution to this arm of the plot even more bizarre: after the relentless anxiety Owen faces for the entirety of the book, the entire problem is waved away through a deus-ex-machina type solution that leaves the reader to wonder if the entire thing couldn't have been solved years and years ago. Owen can't figure out if Janice's incessant paranoia is justified, and Lund doesn't seem to know, either.
Owen's recurring obsession with the ocean seems to be another way to indicate his lack of belonging with the rest of the world. He has a dream of living in the undersea world of The Little Mermaid, essentially a tale about longing to be a part of a world inherently hostile to you and incompatible with your physical body. At times, the water and Owen's longing for it seem to be a kind of symbolic buzzword for his otherness. This makes it all the more confusing that The Little Mermaid's ocean doubles as Owen's planned method of suicide, leaving me confused as to what Lund is trying to say. When Owen turns away from his death at the Golden Gate Bridge, what, exactly, is he turning away from?
The thing I found most interesting in the story was Lund's very creative "terrors," the magical-realist construction of people who have animals living inside them. The idea is mostly used to suggest the idea of queerness - having to hide a real part of yourself from the rest of the world, etc. - but Lund also dips into talking about it more literally in the world she has created: these people are known to exist, spoken about online and in textbooks. Towards the end, another specific example is given: Owen reads about a boy with a cricket in his thigh. The interactions between Owen and Gail are so interesting, and feel magical and fantastic in the best ways. I would have loved to meet more characters like this - what would the cricket be like? How do others get along with the animals inside them? Since the boy and bird depend on each other mutually - if one dies, so does the other - there is plenty of room to discuss the implications of conflict between the creatures. I would have loved to read an underground magic story about these terrors, something in the vein of Gaiman's Neverwhere.
Owen meets two others like him, but never has any interaction with them. Both times Owen is in physical proximity to another "terror" are exciting and make us wonder what kinds of lives these people lead - but Lund doesn't follow through. I am certainly willing to believe this could be leveraged for some meaningful observation - the solidarity with the others that Owen feels, even though he never speaks to them - but I was instead left wondering, as I was many times, what exactly Lund was trying to achieve.
Owen's conflict with his mother Janice is particularly frustrating; he grows wary of her incessant paranoia and "crazy talk," but doesn't seem willing or able to think about his resentment for his mother until the very end of the book, where he confronts her. He tells her he's angry, and tells her plainly how he feels about the things she did; she apologizes tearfully and says she's not perfect. That's the end of that part of the conversation; then they talk about Owen's love life and laugh at a silly joke. Owen leaves to go do other stuff and doesn't really think about it anymore. The entire affair is another instance of Lund's apparent lack of conviction; for almost the entire book, Janice is built up as an unwittingly abusive mother, suffering from grievous mental illness and likely alcoholism, but in the end she is portrayed in an almost exclusively sympathetic light. I got the sense that it was Lund, not Owen, who was forgiving Janice for her treatment of her son.
The Boy with a Bird in His Chest tries to create a fantastical, magical-realist landscape in which to explore questions of identity and belonging. Unfortunately, it lacks commitment to its own ideas, and its mixture allegory and reality creates a confusion at odds with the message of confidence in oneself and one's identity.
samdesnoyers's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0