Description
The fire was fast and hot ... only days after it went through, there were absolutely no birds left.
I should have seen it as an omen, the birds all leaving like that. Robin is a self-confessed bird-nerd from the country, living in the city. On the first day at her new school, she meets Delia.
Delia is freaky and definitely not good for Robin's image. Seth, Delia's brother, has given up school to prowl the city streets. He is angry at everything, especially the fire that killed his mother.
When a rare and endangered bird turns up in the city parklands, the lives of Robin, Seth and Delia become fatefully and dangerously intertwined ...
An intricate love story about nature, grief, friendship and life.
Review
Set in Victoria and split between the bush and the city, this is the story of two families struggling with change.
Robin’s parents split up after a bushfire narrowly missed their farm and Robin desperately misses her pets, but especially the birds who live in the surrounding bush.
Delia and Seth are just surviving after their Mum was killed in the bushfire while studying the endangered Bush Stone-curlew.
Robin and Delia’s worlds collide when Robin starts at Delia’s school, although neither realises their lives are connected. When Robin,
Delia and Seth all see a curlew in the parkland near the city, their stories become linked.
This book is haunting, mysterious and desperately sad, but ultimately it’s a story of hope and beauty, as the three teenagers all come to realise that life must be lived to the fullest.
There are many things in this book that will stay with you long after you stop reading, but the thing I will remember most is that life should be celebrated in even the smallest of things – sun shining on a beautiful red head, birds singing in the morning and that you are never alone whilst there are other living things in your world.
Perfectly suited to Year 10 and up.
Reviewed by Michelle
