(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
It may not sound like an attractive proposition to be told that a novel will break your heart little-by-little before it breaks it completely but what about if we told you that while all that rending and slow motion rupturing is taking place that some quite beautiful and moving rebuilding is taking place at the same time?
Perhaps you might stick around then, and honestly in the case of the quietly transcendent delight that is Ericka Waller’s Goodbye Birdie Greenwing, you really should give that a red-hot go because this is a story that takes a well-worn and much-loved trope, that of disparate souls finding their people and their community, and gives it a gloriously affecting new sheen.
Quite simply, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing is one of those stories that strides into a genre, makes room for itself and then proceeds to offer the elements you know and love but in a way that makes it feel as if it’s the first time you’ve read this kind of story.
That’s a rare and precious thing and if you read as many books, especially from the found-family genre as this reviewer does, you’ll realise how special it is to have a book like this and to feel as if there is something fresh and wonderful about people who ordinarily wouldn’t know, much less care about each other, and yet who do and have their lives irrevocably changed for the better as a result.
How did it come to this? Jane thinks. Could one decision really have undone so much?
At the centre of this profoundly lovely story is the titular character of Birdie Greenwing, an elderly woman who has lost herself in the grief of losing Arthur, her beloved husband, and her sister Rose for some eight years.
It’s been a ceaselessly defeating holding pattern that has seen Birdie retreat from the world, and while she is lonely, she will never admit it nor let anyone in for fear she will lose them as she lost those nearest and dearest to her.
But then life takes over in the form of new next door neighbours, Frankie, a fiercely intelligent, caring proto-teenager on the autism spectrum and her mother Jane, a nurse who has moved her small family to Brighton from Bristol in an attempt to forge a new life away from the overly protective concerns of her mother, Min who is as fiercely uncompromising as she is caring (though she’ll never admit outright to that last attribute).
Unexpected events bring these two sets of lost souls together along with a specialist doctor from a local hospital, Ada, a Polish immigrant who is desperately missing her family on a farm back home but who long given up on making meaningful connections with anyone.
Somehow all these quite different people come together, and as they do in ways that feel quite authentically affecting, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing comes quietly but generously alive, establishing itself as a love song to the power of friendship, family and connection to change lives in some fairly profound ways.
(courtesy Curtis Brown)
What really strikes you about Goodbye Birdie Greenwing is that even though it offers a beautiful story of connections made and torn lives mended, it’s also unfailing honest about grittily dark life can be and how it can take a toll on people.
Everyone from Birdie, who is mourning lost lives and a buoyancy of all encompassing connection she once had with people who loved her unconditionally, to Frankie, who tells it like it is and suffers for her bravery and beyond has had, and continues to have a lot thrown at them.
While the ending is a soul-restorative fairytale of sorts, it feels well-earned and true to the fact that even when wonderful things happen, they often come hard on the heels, or a great deal of time after, a lot of dark nights of the soul and scrambling over obstacles so numerous it easy to wonder if they will ever end.
Waller takes you deep into the hearts and lives of Birdie, Jane, Frankie, Min and Ada, and some meaningfully important who satellite around them for a while before entering their orbit for the better, and doesn’t pretend that their issues are nothing or that solutions to them are lying thickly on the ground.
In fact, it’s fair to say that many of the challenges that face these gorgeously real characters seem to be so trenchant that there is no fix readily available, and while that is true in some circumstances, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing is less concerned about fixing lives, because that’s not always possible, than it is about singing the joys of having people around you while you go through the proverbial valleys of the shadow of death (or events that feel like they might kill you).
‘I only told truth. Why is the truth wrong?’ Frankie asks.
Why indeed? Jane wonders, thinking about what happened with Suki. ‘You know what, Frankie?’ Jane says, as they make their way home. ‘ I think you’re brave. I wish I had an ounce of your courage.’
It’s this infusion of community that makes all the difference in the world to people you will come to care a great deal about.
A community, by the way that is hard-won, reluctantly taken up by almost all concerned – the exceptions are granddaughter and grandmother Frankie and Min who might be too forthright at times but whose hearts and willingness to do something with them and which acknowledges that while the source of our pain, isolation and dislocation might be readily obvious, it doesn’t mean we are willing or able to do something about them.
Seeing how all of these finely-wrought and nuanced characters make the journey from “No, thank you” to “Yes, please” is a heartwarming joy, nuanced steps through the worst that life has to offer to a place where all the very best things are possible, courtesy of the fact that people choose to take the hand offered to them, even if that takes a while and bond together in ways that changes everything.
If you have felt like situations are unsolvable or that community is nothing more than a happy buzzword, then dive headfirst and with your whole heart into Goodbye Birdie Greenwing which reminds us in ways that will make your soul sing that friendship, family and connection matter, that they transform you in ways small and transformatively big and that opening yourself up to people may just be the very thing to happen to you.