The Book of Dead Birds : A Novel

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Summary: ...
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I finished the book very quickly and enjoyed every minute of it. The writing is seamless and thoroughly enjoyable. I will definitely look out for more by Brandeis.

The one problem I have with this is that Brandeis, from what I can tell, is a white woman. However, she is writing about a half Korean/half African American woman. So much of the book involves Korean culture and that makes me feel uncomfortable for reasons I can't quite articulate, however respectful she was of the culture.

I would also recommend readers interested in learning more about the Korean prostitutes who worked for American GIs to read 'Fox Girl' by Nora Okja Keller. That book is far more graffic and disturbing, but goes further than 'Dead Birds' in showing the lives these women endured.

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Summary: ...
Review: ...
I finished the book very quickly and enjoyed every minute of it. The writing is seamless and thoroughly enjoyable. I will definitely look out for more by Brandeis.

The one problem I have with this is that Brandeis, from what I can tell, is a white woman. However, she is writing about a half Korean/half African American woman. So much of the book involves Korean culture and that makes me feel uncomfortable for reasons I can't quite articulate, however respectful she was of the culture.

I would also recommend readers interested in learning more about the Korean prostitutes who worked for American GIs to read 'Fox Girl' by Nora Okja Keller. That book is far more graffic and disturbing, but goes further than 'Dead Birds' in showing the lives these women endured.

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Summary: * under rated and overlooked * ( A GREAT READ)
Review: a great book. the editors review/summary doesnt do it justice.
its about mothers, daughters and the hidden bridges that one woman must cross, in order to acheive even a small amount of understanding......
comparable to > allende, esquival or tan.

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Summary: A mother/daughter book like no other
Review: Brandeis' book is astonishing. A mother who loves birds--a daughter who inadvertently kills them. Woven in is the heartbreaking story of how the mother, a Korean woman forced into prostitution, thinks she's found redemption right up until the baby is born. By the end of this lustrous book, both mother and daughter have begun to make their own peace with their own lives--and with each others. Lyrically written and just beautifully, beautifully told. Stunning in its power.

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Summary: A gift for those who read literary fiction
Review: Gayle Brandeis doesn't write a story, she sings it. From the opening line ("I remember the first time I flew"), I was captured by her voice, by the passionate rhythm of her phrasing. This novel does so much more than tell a story; it exposes the hearts of two women, mother and daughter, and makes you love them. Never before have I finished reading a novel and then turned back to the first page to begin again.

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Summary: Delicate "Dead Birds"
Review: Gayle Brandeis's debut novel, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, is a mistily vivid story that unfolds like a flower. Drawing on the complicated mother-daughter relationships, it's a haunting and delicately-drawn story.

Ava Sing Lo, the child of a Korean immigrant and an African-American GI, has been accidently killing her mother's birds since she was small. After graduating from college, Ava is directionless, aimless, lonely and not feeling at home anywhere. In an effort to make up for her accidental bird-killings, she volunteers to help save sick birds on the Salton Sea. While there, she is reminded and haunted of her mother's past.

Many years before, Hye-yang (thought to be unlucky) left her native village, then the new home she had made for herself. Tricked into a hell of abuse, murder and prostitution at a segregated American army camp, Hye-yang (now called Helen) escapes and is married by a white GI -- only to be dumped when her baby is born with dark skin. The thought of her mother's past haunts Helen as she stumbles across a corpse on the beach, falls in love for the first time, and starts to really get to know her mother.

Reading "Book of Dead Birds," you can almost smell the birds and salt of the Salton Sea. Brandeis has a special talent for putting her readers into the places she writes of, even if they've never been there. And she knows how to tug at the heartstrings without straining them.

Brandeis's writing has an understated lyricism, a sort of poetry without self-consciousness. Her social commentary is all the stronger because it doesn't beat you over the head, and the tragedies all the more terrible because they aren't milked. Ava's sections are more introspective and far-reaching, while Helen's are starker. Sprinkled between chapters are bits of Helen's "Book of Dead Birds," saddening and humorous at once.

Ava is a startlingly vivid character, whose life is not so much sad as it is empty. It's fantastic to see her gradually coming into the happiness she deserves. Helen is quiet, repressed, keeping her past hidden and only letting her sorrow show for the birds. Supporting characters, like the unfortunate little girl Jeniece and the fiery prostitute Sun are equally well-done.

As pretty and deceptively simple-looking as a bird, this book is a haunting, ultimately heartwarming look at mothers and daughters. Highly recommended.

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Summary: A Place Exotic and Familiar
Review: Gayle Brandeis's The Book of Dead Birds has a powerful simplicity unexpected in a first novel. It is the story of Ava Sing Lo, a young woman with a masters in communications who can barely talk to her mother, Helen. All her life, Ava has inadvertently killed Helen's pet birds. When a horrific bird die-off hits the Salton Sea, Ava is compelled to volunteer to help save the birds, to somehow make up for the past.

The scenes at the Salton Sea are rendered so truly, you can smell the air and feel the crunch of the hard shore. Brandeis, who has written about the importance of sensuality in her book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, skillfully puts the reader in the triple-digit heat of the stinking bird kill or the cool waters of a lagoon diving for abalone in Korea.

But the author is tricky. The places and characters in this fierce novel are deceptively exotic. The story is actually a familiar one, exceptionally well told, of the rage between parent and child when life has been so much less than good. Finally, with all its images of death, The Book of Dead Birds is really about rebirth, about taking one more chance, believing that happiness is possible, and deciding to go get it.

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Summary: Subject may not be pretty, but the book is beautiful.
Review: I believe the characters illustrated in this lyrical novel will stay with me for some time. It's a beautiful, well-written story. Gayle Brandeis has a true gift. Her main characters are quiet and introspective, and yet we hear their voices very clearly. We see everything they see, feel everything they feel, and smell everything they smell.

The plot is built around a series of dead birds--birds inadvertently killed by the main character, a young woman of mixed heritage (Korean and African American) named Ava Sing Lo. Information about each bird--its life and cause of death--are recorded in her mother's scrap book, The Book of Dead Birds. As Ava attempts to break the spell of the dying birds and her shame and sorrow of being a disappointment to her mother we come face to face with her fragility, pain, and insecurity. We, and all those within the story, root for her to soar.

Brandeis weaves together two stories--the daughter, Ava, and the mother, Hye-yang (Helen). She takes us from San Diego to the Saltan Sea and back to Korea in the 1960s, where through Ava's retelling of her mother's song, we learn of Hye-yang's slide into prostitution, Ava's conception and their ultimate flight path to freedom.

I highly, highly recommend this book. It's one of the best I've read so far this year.

Respectfully submitted by the author of "I'm Living Your Dream Life," McKenna Publishing.

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Summary: Korean mother-in-law
Review: I really did enjoy this book very much. A friend of mine gave it to me because she knows my husband's mother is Korean. She did not in anyway have the same life as Ava's mother but they do share many characteristics. The morning after soup. The windbreaker at all times. Her harshness even though you know that the love is underneath it all. There were moments when I knew how the mother was going to react or even what she was going to say, not because this book is predictable but because I have a Korean mother-in-law.

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Summary: A powerful and painful bridge to acceptance...
Review: I was intrigued by the title of this sensitive tale of a mother and a daughter and the cultural obstacles that define their lack of common language. Mother and daughter relations provide a universal theme, this relationship made even more poignant by the Korean background of the mother, transported as a war bride to the shores of Southern California. Her daughter is born in America, yet never knows a sense of belonging.

Hye-yang is a dutiful daughter in a Korean village where the women are ocean divers. But Hye-yang is clumsy, unable to contribute to the family's meager coffers, so she goes to the city, where she is tricked into a life of prostitution. As a prostitute, she is demeaned and abused, unable to speak up, even when her best friend, another prostitute, is killed. When a young soldier brings her to America as his wife, Hye-yang, now Helen, hasn't the courage to tell him the shameful truth: her life of prostitution as a vessel for colored soldiers and that she is already pregnant. When the child is born with dark skin, the soldier beats and sexually abuses Helen, leaving her to make a living as a single mother in a strange land.

With her dark skin, Ava Sing Lo looks black, is half-Korean, yet never feels comfortable with either identity. Studious and reliable, her life is spent at school and helping her mother. She secretly reads a journal kept by her mother over the years, where Helen has documented all the birds Ava accidentally killed, meaning only kindness. Ava takes this as another criticism of her abject failure as a daughter. After graduating college, Ava has no sense of direction, no plan for her life. In an effort to do something positive, Ava volunteers to help in an effort to save endangered pelicans at the Salton Sea, determined to prove that she can do something positive.

Leaving San Diego temporarily to live at the Salton Sea, Ava finds herself amid a group of eccentrics that are a balm to her discomfort. Enjoying the open-hearted acceptance of these new friends, Ava begins a process of self-discovery. Then Helen appears at the Salton Sea and, after a while, the mother and daughter experience an unexpected healing, reaching across the years of Helen's silent suffering and Ava's anguished need, bridging the years and opening a door to the future.

The metaphor of the birds is central to Helen's life, and by extension, to her daughter. The birds are ubiquitous in Korea, carping and squawking in the background, distinct in their ability to scavenge for scraps, to exist on the meager amount the stingy land provides. In such a way, Helen has survived, on scraps, physically and emotionally. But she has no words, no legacy for Ava. Helen's spirit has been confined by her silence, in Korea and the strange new land where her daughter is born. Ava's generous and forgiving heart is the balm that heals their wounds, as Ava offers the words to Helen she's longed to speak, "I know the language of birds." Luan Gaines/2003.