The Lovebird

June 24, 2013
"Do you have any friends?" Latin professor Simon Mellinkoff asks 18-year-old Margie Fitzgerald in Brown's debut novel, to which Margie knowingly demurs. Describing herself as shy and "Always Alone," Margie has never known her mother who died in childbirth, was not close to her father, and is distanced from her classmates. But she soon falls in love with Simon and Margie begins to follow him in his advocacy for animal rights. When he introduces her to Operation H.E.A.R.T. (Humans Encouraging Animal Rights Today), Margie feels she's finally found a place where she belongs. After an incident which results in the FBI labeling her as a threat, Margie is forced to go into hiding. She is sent to live on the prairies of Montana in a Native American Reservation with the Crow tribe, and she must leave behind the only people she could now call friends. Although Margie's personality comes off as timid and indecisive, Brown is able to get readers empathizing with her during bouts of loneliness as well as caught up in her passion for what she believes is the right thing to do. Agent: Terra Chalberg, Chalberg & Sussman.

June 1, 2013
In Brown's first novel, an impressionable young woman drifts into animal rights terrorism, goes on the lam and reinvents herself with the help of noble Native Americans and true love. After her Lebanese-born mother dies in childbirth, Margie grows up under the gentle but distant care of her usually drunk father. A waiflike beauty, she is so sensitive that her left ovary aches when she is stressed. As a lonely college freshman, she falls in love with her Latin professor, Simon, a middle-aged widower with a motherless 7-year-old daughter. Simon introduces her both to sexual passion and to the animal rights movement through his organization H.E.A.R.T., which pulls off small illegal acts like freeing birds from their pet-store cages to protest for animal rights. Then Simon dumps Margie and quits H.E.A.R.T., suggesting to the group's typically quirky and diverse members that they put Margie in charge. For a girl who is always sighing about her shyness, Margie has no trouble dancing naked at a party or leading H.E.A.R.T. to burn down a restaurant that proudly serves exotic meat. No one is hurt, but afterward, an undercover policeman nabs Margie, not for arson, but for incendiary speech, when she gives an educational lecture on how to commit arson to prospective H.E.A.R.T. members. Before her trial date, H.E.A.R.T. member Bumble helps her flee to Montana, where she hides out with an Indian family whose matriarch, Granma, was friends with Bumble's mother back during the AIM uprisings in the 1960s. Now, Granma lives off the land with her granddaughter Cora, whose mother is in jail for drugs, and with Cora's dad, Jim, who works at a printing company. Soon enough, Granma and Jim have given Margie a new appreciation of nature and an understanding of the spiritual relationship that can exist between humans and the animals they hunt for food. Then Simon shows up and forces Margie to decide where she really belongs. Self-important pretensions don't deepen the shallow emotional waters in which these predictable characters swim. Brown is no Louise Erdrich.

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June 1, 2013
You're a girl as long as you allow life to happen to you, a wise woman tells Margie Fitzgerald, the sensitive, lovelorn heroine of Brown's debut novel. An impressionable college student when the story begins, Margie falls hard for her handsome, damaged Latin professor, Simon, a single father and dedicated animal rights activist. Simon brings Margie into his group H.E.A.R.T. (Humans Encouraging Animal Rights Today), and it isn't long before Margie is joining protests and liberating animals from pet stores. When Simon abruptly ends their relationship, he leaves the group in her hands, and Margie goes to such extremes she's arrested by the FBI. After another member puts up bail for her, the group convinces Margie to flee to an Indian reservation in Montana, where she is taken in by a Crow family: Jim, a single father; his mother, Evelyn; and his preteen daughter, Cora. In vibrant, colorful language that leaps off the page, Brown paints her winsome heroine's coming-of-age with compassion and affection in this lush, compelling tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)