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Summary
Summary
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
Author Notes
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Safe as Houses, a collection of short stories that won the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the novel 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas. She teaches at NYU, The Center for Fiction, The Sackett Street Workshops, and the Emerging Writer's Workshop for One Story, where she was the associate editor.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
Kirkus Review
One week before her wedding, The Bride is confronted in her Long Island hotel room by the spirit of her dead grandmother, embodied in the form of a parakeet, who begs her to reconnect with her estranged brother, a reclusive playwright who has made his career by staging the worst moment of The Bride's own life. The main character of this self-assured, strange, and winning book is a young woman in the final stages of preparing for her wedding to the groom, an elementary school principal whom she likes because he "doesn't have to be drunk to dance." However, as the wedding date approaches, The Bride's psychological landscape becomes increasingly hazardous, and all her life's certainties come under review. Following her grandmother's avian visit, The Bride--who works as a biographer for people with traumatic brain injuries, helping them reconstruct their lives prior to their traumatizing events--travels back into the city to finalize her wedding plans, meet with her current client, pick up a new wedding dress (her original one has been liberally befouled by parakeet granny), and arrange a meeting with her brother, Tom, whose acclaimed play, Parakeet, is back on Broadway. The Bride lost contact with her brother over the course of the 10 years that have passed since their grandmother's death and her own traumatizing event, a random act of violence that forms the central story of her brother's play. When she finally does manage to hunt Tom down, she discovers that in those 10 years he has transitioned into Simone and must reenter her life, if she deigns to, as The Bride's sister. From there--in the bright, prismatic, and fleeting language of the internet age--Bertino traces The Bride's ping-pong journey in and out of the lives, and sometimes literally the bodies, of her frosty and judgmental mother; her professionally competent best friend; strangers who might be former lovers or alternate versions of herself; parakeet costumed performers who are being paid to reenact the Bride's past, present, and potential future; and a Japanese lifestyle-blogging reptile in a suit and tie, to name a few of Bertino's many memorable characters. The book's linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino's images demand a lot of the reader, but the relatability of The Bride's honest and earnest attempts to do her best with the uncooperative life she has been given resonate on a deep, perhaps even universal, frequency. A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered from humdrum reality, Bertino's second novel, after 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), takes place in the lead-up to The Bride's wedding. Staying alone at the Long Island inn where she'll be married come Saturday, The Bride receives a visit from her long-dead grandmother in the form of a very alive parakeet. Grandmother/bird has much to say, and leaves The Bride with a directive: find her brother, or "shit's going to get fucked up." Absolutely not, says The Bride, before cliff-stepping into "a very specific nervous breakdown." She keeps running into herself, literally. One morning, she wakes up in her mother's body, and must endure her public farting attack. Every day, she forgets to visit the whiny florist who wants her to come pick up her bouquet. The Bride probably doesn't want to get married, but there's far more going on here: the story behind her traumatic hospitalization, her estrangement from her beloved playwright brother, and her work with brain-injury survivors. Bertino playfully, precisely builds a big world in these pages, somehow making the case that there's too much love, pain, and magic to ever fit in one story, and fitting it in all the same.
Library Journal Review
The week before she is to be married, the Bride is visited by her dead grandmother in the form of a parakeet. During their conversation, the bird warns that the Bride should call off the wedding and go find her estranged brother instead, emphasizing the importance of this message by ruining the Bride's wedding dress. This startling encounter leads the Bride not only to begin searching for her brother but also to reconsider her upcoming marriage and ponder life's big questions. While searching for a replacement wedding dress, she encounters a former lover, making her think about past partnership choices. One morning, she wakes up in her mother's body and must literally "walk in her shoes," resulting in a better understanding of what drives her mother. When she locates and confronts her brother, her entire outlook changes. VERDICT O. Henry and Pushcart winner Bertino (2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas) skillfully weaves together reality and flights of fancy as she tackles a wide variety of issues women face and the different ways to navigate these issues. An amusing yet instructive work about how personal perspective can change everything; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
