Star How to Make a Bird

Writing with an unusual sensitivity and a poet's sensibility, Murray (The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley) details the tragedy-ridden life of 17-year-old Mannie Clarkeson. Her home becomes unstable when her theatrical and depressive mother runs off with another man ("She was always in a mood, she never just was; never just a plain clear sky, always weather changes slipping and rippling across her face"). Now Mannie plans to travel from her small Australian town of Castlemaine to Melbourne to visit her grandmother, then perhaps on to Sydney and Paris to find the freedom to strike out on her own: "I'd just float off, figuring that life would be better if I was a bird and not a girl with a bung leg and bad thoughts." Mannie has high hopes, but her past and the loss of her love interest weigh down her journey. Told in a sweeping and elegant series of flashbacks, this novel, first published in Australia in 2003, presents a delicate internal journey and a sophisticated meditation on the struggle to find wholeness in broken pieces. Ages 12–up. (June)