A BIRD WILL SOAR
ALISON GREEN MYERS
Schneider Family Book Award
Dutton Children’s Books, 2021
ISBN 978-0-593-32567-4
Once in a while you come across a book, that after reading it, makes you pause and think, even marvel because you’ve encountered life from an entirely new perspective.
Alison Green Myers’, debut novel, A Bird Will Soar, is such a book. And a recipient of the prestigious Schneider Family Book Award given by the American Library Association for excellence in the portrayal of the disability experience in literature for youth.
Axel, an autistic boy, feels most at home in nature. It is his peaceful place to think and make sense of his parents, and the garden of people in his life that grow up around him and become family. Axel also discovers that he can learn about people by bird watching. His favorite is the eagle. When family calls, the eagle focuses on the nest and never abandons it. So, he wonders why his father left. The eagle also knows just how high it can fly. Something Axel wishes his mother would let him discover about himself: to trust him and give him room to navigate using his own intuition and instincts.
When a tornado hits, Axel’s predictable world is turned upside down. His home is damaged and uninhabitable, locking him out of the safe space of his own room. Fallen trees have made his beloved woods unsafe to visit. The eagle’s nest with its young that he has been observing has been blown out of the tree by the fierce winds. And his estranged father has returned home. All of Axel’s knowledge and hopes are put to the test.
Can he care about his father as much as he does about the eagle? “To feel something so strongly for another living thing.” (page 93). Will his gut instincts lead him to make the right choices and decisions? Will he finally learn just how high he can fly?
A Bird Will Soar is insightful and captivating. Alison Green Myers masterfully takes us into Axel’s mind revealing this unique character’s thoughts, feelings, and coping mechanisms. The book is also a beautiful exploration of the symbiotic and beneficial relationship between humans and nature.
If you read and were intrigued and entertained by the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, you will be enthralled and elevated by, A Bird Will Soar.
Buy the book and start soaring!
Veronica Jorge
See you next time on March 22nd!
Books Reviewed by Veronica Jorge
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When you love someone, you want to know everything about them. That someone, in this case, was my maternal grandmother. We shared a close bond, but there was a wrinkle on the face-map of her life that I could not trace. I wish I had asked her my questions while she was still with me.
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The Many Colors of Us: Remembering 9/11
by Veronica JorgeMost people are a combination of various cultures, though I think their ancestors tended to confine their marriages to one continent.
Mine didn’t.
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A story of second-chances, hope, friendship, gratitude, and yes, the redeeming power of love, A Slight Change of Plans, satisfies at many levels. As the title suggests, things may not always work out the way we plan or expect. Colby encourages us to believe that there is a good plan for our lives, and a Master Planner who knows how to put all of the pieces together in the right place if we would only trust Him and let Him.
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The world’s treasures, many of them at your fingertips, in the pages of a book.
Such was my experience during a recent museum visit when I discovered an inspiring and uplifting work of art, Girl Balancing Knowledge, by the sculptor Yinka Shonibare. A British-Nigerian artist, he explores themes of cultural identity in a globalized world. The bright colors of the African Ankara fabrics he uses in his pieces are appealing and strikingly eye catching.
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Below is an excerpt from one of our 2024 mentees, Veronica Jorge, from her project, Crushed Like Sugarcane, based on her Chinese ancestor, Zhou Zhijian, who left China to work in the sugarcane fields of Cuba where he was enslaved. In this portion, newly arrived and unwilling to accept the situation, he decides to escape:
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