The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor

Alznauer treats writer Flannery O’Connor’s life with exceptional delicacy and depth of feeling. Regularly chastised by her mother, the girl devotes herself to her chickens, gaining brief fame by training one to walk backward. “There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look,” she discovers. As an adult, O’Connor is diagnosed with lupus, and her fame as a writer who “wanted to wake readers up like a rooster crowing” grows as her health deteriorates. At last, living at home with her mother, she fills her yard with peacocks, whose unearthly beauty—like “a thousand haloed suns”—intoxicates her. Using bold swaths of color, Zhu often shows O’Connor from far off, visualizing her isolation; the birds, by contrast, sit front and center, their plumage crisp and colorful. Alznauer understands her subject’s instinctive attentiveness to the beauty of anything that doesn’t fit in: “She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something so large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness.” Ages 4–8. [em](June) [/em]