(courtesy Affirm Press)
As life races by at breakneck speed, it’s all too easy to assume that if we have fully realised who we are and what we could become by a certain age that it’s simply too damn late.
But in Rhianna King’s utterly delightful debut novel, Birds of a Feather, two women discover that it’s never too late to embrace your heart, its authentic expression and whatever form of truly fulfilled life springs forth from it.
Beth is the sort of person who has never really fit in with her family.
Whether they are exuberantly artistic and loquacious, spontaneous and prone to just going with the anarchically vivacious flow, Beth is buttoned down, thoughtful, someone who plans and reasons and very much sticks to her narrow and certain lane.
A conservation officer with the local council who’s making a real difference to some of the environmental changes facing the city of Perth, Australia where she lives, Beth has a reasonably happy and fulfilling life, owner of her own home, driver behind a number of key projects and happily close to her grandmother Elise who is the bulwark she needs against a family who simply don’t seem to get, want or really need her.
But somewhere deep down, Beth isn’t entirely happy but questioning what might be wrong and what’s needed to fix it is a conversation she really doesn’t want to have with herself, so she stays where she is and enjoys what she has even if it’s not necessarily everything she wants.
After we said out farewells and Emily and Jack drove off, Gran lingered with the car door open and scanned the landscape, as if adding additional colour and detail to her mind’s eye picture of the place she’d known her whole life.
‘What a good day at the office,’ she beamed.
I [Beth] couldn’t have agreed more.
Then one day, in a bid to her family, and herself for that matter, that she can be spontaneous, Beth buys a lottery ticket to the biggest draw of the year.
When she wins a relatively significant sum of money – big enough, she observes, not to be life-changing but capable of making a real difference to her circumstances – she decides to do some nice things for herself and her family including her darling grandmother Elise to whom she often an open ticket to do whatever she’d like to.
Elise eschews any sort of material gift but asks Beth’s help in tracking down her first love who is, to Beth’s great surprise, a woman named Gerry with whom Elise fell madly in love with in her university days but who became a casualty of a world that was too conservative to understand the rich diversity of love.
So off they set, across the internet and to London where Elise and Gerry meet, rekindle old passion and commitment and Beth meets someone who has the capacity, even in her tightly-controlled world, to bust the doors wide open and change a present badly in need of some inner renovation and outward change.
To say anymore than that is to give away spoilers too many but suffice to say that Birds of a Feather is a gloriously lovely and emotionally rich and honesty story of what happens when you drop set ideas of how things should be and just see where they will take you.
(courtesy official author site)
The driving emotional power behind the propulsively fun and adventurous charm of Birds of a Feather is the close bond between Beth and Elise.
They are the outliers in their family, and it’s their closeness that provides a sanctuary for both of them, Beth in particular, but the liberating point of the novel is that sanctuaries can become prisons of a sort and that maybe what we all need is less safety and dogged certainty and a lot more wild upsetting of the status quo.
That’s not even remotely what Beth sets out to do of course but it’s what she gets, and as Birds of a Feather progresses, she discovers just how good it can be to step well and truly outside of your comfort zone and to find out who you are at your core and where that might all lead if you just take the brakes off.
Beth is certainly inspired by the bravery and chutzpah of her grandmother who accepted many years earlier that her immediate future lay in what turned out to be a very happy heteronormative relationship, but who is now willing to see what might have happened if she had simply and completely followed her heart.
Elise is, by any measure, a joyous inspiration, not just to Beth but to anyone lucky enough to read Birds of a Feather, and her willingness to finally do what she was denied doing decades earlier powers this story to some pretty affectingly wonderful places.
‘Yes,’ Gerry answered enthusiastically. ‘I’ve got a few bits and pieces on the go here, but nothing I can’t defer for a little while. The university is always nagging me to take some annual leave. And I haven’t been to Australia for so long; it will be lovely to spend some time there again.’
‘Oh, Gerry,’ Elise exhaled. ‘That would be bloody marvellous.’
Birds of a Feather benefits immensely from the fact that it is both beautifully and fulsomely light and frothy, funny and delightful, but that it is also grounded in the real and gritty stuff of human life.
King manages to meld the fun and the serious together in a wonderful story that recognises life’s light and dark, its highs and its lows, its propensity to embrace imprisonment and liberation and the way in which the decisions may not always be the ones we want to make but that they can always be undone if they aren’t what we decide we want or need further down the track.
As reinventions go, Birds of a Feather is an effervescent buzz, ripe with hope and possibility that doesn’t pretend life is an easy thing to navigate but happily acknowledges that if you’re brave enough and willing enough, it can be truly something you and very special.
It’s impossible not to emerge from reading Birds of a Feather without feeling a little, or a lot, reborn yourself, and quite apart from seeing how life changes for Beth and Elise in ways that will do your heart good, you will feel energised to look around you, check out the lay of the land and wonder if you too shouldn’t take a good look at what is and take some real and life-changing steps to see what could be.