Birdland

From The Critics

Thirteen-year-old Jed is seeking live-action video footage of New York's East Village, but in no time he finds himself chasing down a different layer of story altogether. Lines from his dead brother Zeke's poetry haunt this journey, evoking the rawness of uninvited memories and an unacknowledged guilt. Mack's swirling views of a restless city constitute both backdrop and context for Jed's grief. The changing energies of New York-water towers and sidewalks, cafes and the blinking on of evening lights-are rendered all the more real because we encounter them through the lens of the young protagonist's emerging consciousness. Here is a family unable to face the wrenching failure that Zeke's death represents to each of them, in a city that is itself coming to terms with the meaning of healing. That connection is commendably understated. The wound on the skyline is simply there, a reflection of an empty place at a table. Mack's handling of the toddler's response (play followed by an easy forgetting), is poignant and believable precisely because it is light and glancing. Jed's video-search for the city's heart slowly begins to untangle the threads of a diverse array of themes, as the tensions come together in the person of the homeless girl, Kiki. Other surprises both delight and comfort-the homage paid to emergent childhood literacy through Alice and The Carrot Seed; the power of community; and the strains of Charlie Parker from which the title is derived. Most of all this is a story about the resilience of life, that sometimes halts in a desperate stutter, but then re-gathers and goes forward, stubbornly refusing to cease. 2003, Scholastic, Ages 9 up.
— Uma Krishnaswami