Critics' Opinion:
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Published Apr 2004
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
With great beauty and lyricism, The Book of Dead Birds captures a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her mother's terrible past while she searches for her own place in the world.
Ava Sing Lo has been accidentally killing her mother's birds since she was a little girl. Now in her twenties, Ava leaves her native San Diego for the Salton Sea, where she volunteers to help environmental activists save thousands of birds poisoned by agricultural runoff.
Helen, her mother, has been haunted by her past for decades. As a young girl in Korea, Helen was drawn into prostitution on a segregated American army base. Several brutal years passed before a young white American soldier married her and brought her to California. When she gave birth to a black baby, her new husband quickly abandoned her, and she was left to fend for herself and her daughter in a foreign country.
PEN/Bellwether Prize, 2002
"The plight of the mother and daughter is … heartbreaking." - Kirkus Reviews
"A moving and perceptive first novel." - O magazine
"Brandeis's writing is sensitive, lyrical and diverse." - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"A uniquely inventive novel." - Rocky Mountain News
"Intricate and elegant ... a novel that illustrates a compelling search for meaning that is ultimately familiar." - Denver Post
"Moving … powerful and strangely interesting." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
This information about The Book of Dead Birds was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gayle Brandeis grew up in the Chicago area and has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old. She is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage and Delta Girls, and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns, which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. 2017 brought the release of two books: a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide.
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