The King of the Birds

Flannery, a bespectacled girl in a plaid dress, earns a national newspaper mention with a chicken she trains to walk backward, but her celebrity career ends there. Now, with things “a little too quiet,” she adds a peacock to her yard of fowl, but he won’t display his magnificent tail. “What’s wrong with him?” the boy next door asks. Flannery courts the peacock with a party and flowers, but nothing works. Then she gets a peahen, and that produces results: “With a proud sigh, he raised his tail into an enormous green-gold arch that circled his body like a giant glimmering crown.” Nelson stages the scenes on hand-painted taupe paper with cutout shapes, old prints of speckled hens, photographs of elderly neighbors, and other scrapbook ephemera. In a brief, graceful afterword, Macam and Nelson explain that the story is based on writer Flannery O’Connor, who kept fowl as a child and trained a hen to walk backward. (They note that O’Connor’s work “proved that everybody—even preachers and grandmothers—needs to be forgiven.”) It’s a droll, low-key debut for both author and artist. Ages 4–7. (Sept.)