Bird

Starred review from August 17, 2015
In her powerful debut novel, Holland (What Begins with Bird) tells the story of Bird, a mother and wife who, over the course of an innocuous weekday, reminisces about her drug-fueled spell with Mickey, a past flame, after a telephone call from an old friend, Suzie, tips her off to his latest escapades. Alternating between past and present, Bird mentally slips into her former life—a time of squatting in rundown buildings, risky sex, suffering a miscarriage, traveling cross-country, and encountering odd characters—as her contemporary self watches her son board the school bus and, later, soaks in the tub with her infant daughter, in Bird’s rural home in a vague Northeast setting. Telephone conversations with Suzie, who is embracing the wild existence Bird abandoned, bridge the eventually blurring time lines and result in a surreal journey. Holland crafts a deceptive narrative, one that on the surface appears to chronicle the dreariness of domesticity, yet ultimately transforms itself into a densely layered tale of lust and ache, filled with touches of the bizarre. A fascinating novel.

September 1, 2015
In this brief, fiercely erotic novel, a woman who appears enveloped in conventional domesticity clings to memories of the dangerously bohemian life she shared with her former lover. The opening scene of graphic sadomasochistic sex with Mickey, her former lover, that Bird is dreaming, or perhaps remembering, is interrupted by a ringing phone that wakes her in the present. Rapturous if sometimes-troubling memories of Mickey continue to slam-dance into her daily routine. As the day unfolds, Bird gets her boy off to school, nurses the baby, gives breakfast to her husband-for whom she feels mildly irritated affection-and attempts desultory housekeeping. All the while, in nonlinear fits and starts, she relives her affair with Mickey: the unheated apartment in pre-gentrified Brooklyn; the "junk" they snorted; their violent sex; Mickey's fall down an elevator shaft. Neither Bird's pregnancy nor Mickey's marriage proposal came to fruition. After taking a haphazard cross-country trip and meeting an even more degraded, desperate couple, Bird and Mickey returned to New York and broke up. While she remains addicted to the idea of Mickey and the squalid passion he offered, she is ambivalent. She loves her little boy and infant daughter with fierce maternal protectiveness. Although Bird enjoys losing herself in reveries of Mickey, she tells herself she doesn't want her son to be like him or her daughter to love a boy like him too long. Given that Bird recently cracked a pelvis in childbirth, readers may wonder if the novel is actually a literary riff on postpartum depression. Holland (Swim for the Little One First, 2012, etc.) gives Bird's past with Mickey a visceral immediacy but keeps her present life in New England abstract and slightly out of focus. An admirable tour de force of imagery and linguistic pyrotechnics, but the endless talk about passion eventually pours cold water over the initial fiery energy, turning a novel about heightened emotions into a trudge.

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December 1, 2015

Bird, a woman from a privileged background, is haunted by memories of her obsessive relationship with a young man named Mickey. Living together as squatters in a tumbledown apartment, they scavenge for firewood and food like urban campers. Eventually, they drive out West, where their relationship plays out, and they end up hitching a ride with an even stranger couple. In her present life, Bird is drinking too much and married to a husband who is barely present. She spends her days caring for her two young children, her slum life with Mickey now the stuff of dreamy, eliding flashbacks woven into the narrative. VERDICT A stylistic tour de force, this slim novel by Holland (The Spectacle of the Body) is more poetry than prose, all imagery and sensuousness, its story line nearly as elusive as a mirage.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015
Short-story writer Holland presents her first novel, a potent account of Bird, a physically and emotionally broken mother who, in the course of mundane daily life, revisits the raw and reckless love she once experienced with a man named Mickey. Their sexually charged and ultimately doomed relationship led them on a wild ride through the best and worst of each other. But Bird still misses Mickey and keeps tabs on him through a friend, seemingly unwilling to release him or the past. Though Holland's tale may not appeal to the average reader, it is remarkably innovative and astonishingly original, defying easy categorization as it daringly pushes boundaries with language and story structure. Along the way, Holland highlights the extreme feelings and actions possible between lovers, parents and children, and friends. Holland's clever depiction of the blurry lines between love and hate, devotion and abandonment, and detachment and obsession will give fascinated readers a lot to ponder.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)