Introduction

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.

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.

“Lyrical, imaginative, beautifully crafted, and deeply intelligent. Before anything else, its characters take you by the heart.” --Barbara Kingsolver

The Book of Dead Birds is the winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, an award in support of a literature of social change. Reviewers have highly praised this, her first novel, and Toni Morrison said: "It has an edgy beauty that enhances perfectly the seriousness of its contents."

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Excerpt

Chapter One
I remember the first time I flew.

I was four years old. My mother decided to take me to Balboa Park for the afternoon. I watched the back of her short-sleeved blouse as we crossed the parking lot to the playground; the sky-blue fabric tightened, then loosened, tightened, then loosened, across her shoulder blades, pointy as chicken wings. I tried to catch up, but my mother was too fast. Even then, I knew she didn't like to be seen with me in public. I knew it was because of my skin -- so much darker than my mother's, dark like the treats she made out of dates that morning, the ones that stuck between my teeth, filling my mouth with a prickly sweetness. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the Publisher's Reading Guide:

1. Discuss the author's choice to use Keats and Mitchell for the epigraph. How are these passages significant to the novel?

2. Ava recollects the seesaw incident with her mother Helen at Balboa Park. Why was Helen so determined do this? What did she want to show Ava? Do you think Ava finally sees what her mother intended her to see?

3. Ava is at a crucial point of her life, on the cusp of adulthood. Must she must leave her house and her mother to redefine herself. Why?

4. "I unwrap a Crunch bar, let my teeth pass through the deep brown chocolate, the pale crisped rice inside. Such an easy balance between those two flavors; such an uneasy balance in my own life -- chocolate and rice, battling it out, creating something different, something neither flavor can really claim." Is her skin color her main struggle, or is there more?

5. Discuss the parallel between the birds and women. Is there a social parallel -- the treatment of women by men, culture and society? How does Helen's past as a prostitute fit into this? What is the significance of the dead women Ava finds?

6. Music plays a crucial role in the novel -- Ava finds solace in beating her drum, even if she plays it incorrectly; Helen sings to Ava; and even Ava Sing Lo's name is tied to the theme of music. How does music help reconcile Ava and her mother?

7. The natural world plays a big part in The Book of Dead Birds. Were you surprised by the harsh landscapes of Korea and southern California, and is there beauty, after all, in these places?

8. Discuss the title The Book of Dead Birds, and how the novel itself -- not just Helen's scrapbook, is a "book of dead birds." Why does Helen keep this scrapbook? What does it mean to her? What does it say about her and about her relationship to her daughter? Is there redemption for the birds and the women at the end of the novel?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Chapter Excerpt
»	Publisher's Reading Guide
»	Gayle Brandeis' web site

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