Birds Art Life

October 31, 2016
Maclear (Stray Love), a Canadian novelist and children’s author, constructs a literary jewel box into which she places a year’s worth of ramblings collected while urban birding with a Toronto musician turned hobbyist photographer. Her tiny gems of thought are borne of purposeful waiting, quietude, and reflection; her anecdotes are about being a daughter and a parent, a creator and an observer, and an essentially solitary person who seeks connection with others. Some of the book’s passages feel overwrought, such as a section in which Maclear draws parallels between avians and humans who have been praised for their smallness. Her line drawings also feel frivolous compared with her often elegant language. But at her best, Maclear makes her nostalgic but unsentimental revelations appear serendipitous, and their seemingly haphazard manner belies their careful arrangement. These brief, well-paced tales possess a peripatetic air while touching on core questions of humanity. She finds quiet joy in engaging with a world that’s largely indifferent to humans. Maclear’s book is appealing in its appreciation of non-human nature in the midst of city life, agnosticism about the place of human activity in the midst of nature’s rhythms, and exploration of the relationship between captivity and freedom. Illus. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists.

October 15, 2016
A meditation on freedom and confinement and the creative tension between the two.Maclear (Julia Child, 2014, etc.) has written books for children and adults and some that blur the distinction with appeal for both, but she has never written a book quite like this. Also, few other books on birding are anything like this, for her "observation" is mainly restricted to urban Toronto, where the kinds of birds she sees aren't likely to be exotic. What grabs and holds readers' attention is the author's own attention, as she describes in detail what she is seeing, how she is feeling, and how her perception and perspective are both shifting, however subtly. She began her unlikely bird year during "the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn't know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should....I had lost the beat." Her father was ailing, her work was faltering, and, in what she calls her "roomy marriage," she needed to explore something outside. "In my husband's presence," she writes, "I have felt my solitude dissolve, but I have also felt lonelier than the moon; such are the contradictions of intimacy." The simple precision of Maclear's prose belies the depth, as if the book were the tip of the iceberg and what she has elided or omitted constitutes the rest. She attached herself to a birding musician as a guide (her husband is also a musician; neither is named in the text), and it was through what she experienced with him that she discovered new ways of seeing and being. "The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things," she discovered. By this point, she had outgrown the need for a guide. Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.