Birds of Paradise

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More About This Book

Overview

Avis Muir is a brilliant pastry chef, Brian Muir a corporate real estate attorney. Their son, Stanley, is the proprietor of a trendy food market. Their beautiful daughter, Felice, is missing. A runaway at 13, Felice has spent five years modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach. She’s about to turn 18. Soon all of the Muirs will be forced to confront their anguish, loss, and sense of betrayal. And Felice must reckon with the guilty secret that drove her away, then face her fear of losing her family and her sense of self forever.

Set against the vibrant backdrop of contemporary Miami, Birds of Paradise is filled with piercing insights into the politics of food and sugar, teen culture, and of the ebb and flow of marriage. The writing is sumptuous, the story moving, and the descriptions of food (one of Abu-Jaber’s specialties) are mouth-watering.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Abu-Jaber's fourth novel (after Origin) is a stunning portrayal of a damaged family. Five years before, at 13, beautiful Felice Muir ran away from home and her mother, Avis, father, Brian, and older brother, Stanley, to live on the streets of Miami. Avis relies on sporadic meetings with her daughter although Felice often neglects to appear. When Brian thinks of Felice, he focuses on the past: "In that warm salty night, he felt as if the texture of time itself were thickening, settling over them, as if they would be held together in the froth of air, its silky threads attaching and keeping them safe, everlasting family." Work keeps all of them absorbed: Avis is an expert pastry chef, Brian a real estate lawyer haunted by Miami's gentrification, Stanley the owner of a popular organic food shop, and even Felice has occasional modeling gigs that bring in small influxes of cash. Felice has left them, but her parents and brother are also alienated from one other as they mark the passage of time and reflect on Felice's upcoming 18th birthday. Abu-Jaber's effortless prose, fully fleshed characters, and a setting that reflects the adversity in her protagonists' lives come together in a satisfying and timely story. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Stunningly beautiful Felice Muir spends her 18th birthday getting wasted at the beach with her homeless friends. Her pastry-chef mother, Avis, bakes her a cake but ends up crumbling it into the ocean as a potion-savvy Haitian neighbor looks on. Felice's father, Brian, and her brother, Stanley, simply try to ignore the day. Having run away from home at 13 to exorcise her guilt over a teenage prank gone wrong, Felice has spent the intervening years on the streets of Miami, occasionally earning money by modeling. The family deals with Felice's disappearance—and occasional reappearance—by immersing themselves in their work: Avis in her pastry business, Brian as an attorney in a development firm, and Stanley in his organic market. VERDICT Whether it's the creation of evanescent confections or the drug-ridden life of the streets, award-winning writer Abu-Jaber (Origin) impressively describes vastly different worlds with equal expertise. Particularly notable in this exceptionally written novel is Miami itself, portrayed as vividly as any of the characters. A literary family drama with extra appeal to foodies. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/11.]—Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
More Reviews (4) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews

Abu-Jaber (Origin, 2007, etc.) uses a plot staple of standard-issue domestic melodrama—a family dealing with a runaway daughter—to develop a meticulous, deeply moving portrayal of imperfect human beings struggling to do right.

Miami, churning with money, steamy energy and clashing cultures shortly before the recent real-estate crash, is the evocative setting. Elite pastry chef Avis Muir and her husband Brian, a corporate lawyer for a big developer, remain in crisis five years after their stunningly beautiful daughter Felice ran away. Still in Miami, Felice has met briefly with her mother a handful of times, but neither her father nor older brother Stanley, whom Avis always neglected in her obsession with Felice, has seen her since she was 13. As a hurricane approaches, the characters are buffeted by their own internal storms. Increasingly brittle and withdrawn, Avis finds herself drawn to a mysterious Haitian neighbor with her own terrible family secrets. Passive Brian, overwhelmed with his sense of failure as husband and father, is tempted both to have an affair and to invest in a cockamamie real estate deal. Stanley, always underrated by his parents, is now the charismatic proprietor of a wildly popular organic market he fears he may lose to encroaching development. About to turn 18, Felice is outgrowing her life as a street kid but believes she must stay away from home to punish herself for past acts. Glorious descriptions, both of nature and Avis's mouthwatering pastry, offset yet intensify the jagged emotions of the Muirs.

In this provocative exploration of the fault lines of loyalty and guilt, Abu-Jaber's searing perceptions, particularly about parents and children, more than make up for a less than convincing ending or an occasional lapse into overlabored prose.

Cristina Garcia
In the end, the indisputable stars of Birds of Paradise are Felice and Miami itself, with its obliterating light, its "perfumed flames" of vegetation, the grand theater of its skies, its "running currents of Spanish." Miami and Felice mirror each other, getting under our skin, making us sweat to soaking. Abu-Jaber has captured Miami's insiders and outsiders, the ordinary and the outlandish, the hype, the hurricanes, the hoopla.
—The New York Times Book Review
Ron Charles
Diana Abu-Jaber's delicious new novel weighs less than two pounds, but you may gain more than that by reading it. If you know her cream-filled work—especially Crescent and The Language of Baklava—you're already salivating. This Jorda­­nian American author writes about food so enticingly that her books should be published on sheets of phyllo dough. Birds of Paradise contains her most mouthwatering writing ever, but it's no light after-dinner treat. This is a full-course meal, a rich, complex and memorable story that will leave you lingering gratefully at her table.
—The Washington Post
Booklist
“Nuanced and deftly drawn. . . . Will [also] draw teens.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780393064612
  • Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
  • Publication date: 9/6/2011
  • Pages: 362
  • Sales rank: 105,261
  • Product dimensions: 6.50 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Diana Abu-Jaber
Diana Abu-Jaber

Diana Abu-Jaber is the award-winning author of Origin, Crescent, Arabian Jazz, and The Language of Baklava. Her writing has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Ms., Salon, Vogue, Gourmet, the New York Times, The Nation, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She divides her time between Coral Gables, Florida, and Portland, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

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( 8 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 8 Customer Reviews

  • Posted October 12, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Language of Life

    There are books you read for the enjoyment of the story and ones you read for the language of the author. Diana Abu-Jaber has written a book that includes both. You can not help but be swept up in both the riveting story of a young run-away girl on the streets af Miami and the lyrical language of life for her family who struggles to come to terms with her absence.
    This book is flavored with the language of food. With the disappearance of Felice, both mother and son turn to their love of food and baking to see their way through the years.
    Birds of Paradise follows closely behind Diana's previous works in its food-driven descriptions and themes.
    I have loved every one of Abu-Jaber's books and feel that this is her best yet. As a chef, I can not help but be envious of Diana's obvious command of pastries and cooking and her ability to describe the flavors and techniques of cuisine.
    This is a wonderfully haunting and gripping novel. You will not be disappointed.
    Victoria Allman
    author of: SEAsoned: A Chef's Journey with Her Captain

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 9, 2012

    Not Very Likable Characters

    I found this book very boring. Hard to imagine allowing your 13 year old to run away and live on the streets of Miami.16, maybe, but 13 is a child. Why not call the police, call social services, call child welfare, do something.
    Did not care for this book at all, would never recommend.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted January 4, 2012

    Interesting perspectives on a troubled family

    Each member of the family gets a turn to interpret their reactions to daughter's leaving home. That makes for a well rounded perspective of the crisis and it's aftermath and conclusions. Sometimes though the multiple narrators were just frustrating to an ongoing plot line, but I guess that was the beat way to get the entire picture of the problems.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 14, 2011

    Interesting story about a family in crisis...

    Well-written story about a Florida family whose teenage daughter runs away from home at the age of 13 and how it affects the family psychologically. I'm still trying to figure out why she ran away...not sure it was a good enough reason. I was alittle disappointed in that I was expecting a story about Arab-American culture since the author is Arab-American herself, but it was just a story about an all-American family with no references to Arab culture at all. Of course ethnic writers should be able to write about more than their ethnic culture.

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  • Posted October 24, 2011

    Would not recommend

    this book was hard to get into, and never got any better. Put it away mid-way. Did not like.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 19, 2011

    Slow start but stay with it

    Birds of Paradise takes a little getting used to. Each chapter is from the viewpoint of a different character, so the timelines get confusing.
    The characters are all doing their best to survive the story they know, and all are in pain. So, this is definitely a drama and any resolution is good.

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  • Posted October 5, 2011

    Intense book

    Realy liked this book. Intense and very heart breaking.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 15, 2012

    No text was provided for this review.

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