FICTION Bird Courtney Collins Hachette, $32.99 The story in Courtney Collins’ novel, Bird , begins with an arranged marriage and then a rebellion. Bird is 14 years old and refuses to be chattel.
The drama unfolds in parallel storylines: the first in an unspecified location in the Himalayas where a daughter is being sold off to settle a father’s debt; the second in Darwin, where a girl wakes up in a hospital with no memory, a bullet wound and an exceptionally disorientated sense of self. Courtney Collins’ novel is written in the second person, which is tricky to do, but she makes it work. In the former, the daughter runs away with no desire other than basic liberty, but the infinite wilderness offers no respite.
A boy accompanies, though his real motives are unclear. These chapters are unanchored by time ( Unknown Year is the title of one), further unsettling us by refusing to offer anything remotely grounding. (The Himalayas are, after all, huge.
) In the latter ( Present Day ), our heroine is trying to reconstruct her history; as a victim of maternal abandonment, she is guided by the warmth and generosity of a nurse who tends to her in hospital. The peripheral characters are clearly drawn archetypes – canine-owning single woman in her late 30s: good; chain-smoking sexual predator and boyfriend of irresponsible mother: bad. The slow unfolding resembles the visual depiction of DNA: two linked strands that wind around each other resembling a twisted ladder.
It tries to p.