[Freebird is] the rare work of fiction that feels more timely with each passing moment.”—Seattle Weekly
“Thanks to Raymond's loose, masterful style, Freebird is an arm wrestling match between hilarity and heartbreak.”—Interview
“A binge-worthy novel, lightly satirical and compulsively readable.”—Shelf Awareness
“Freebird’s structure is a symmetrical braid, wrapping the experiences of underappreciated Los Angeles city employee Anne Singer, her Navy SEAL brother Ben, and Anne’s just-post-high-school son Aaron around one another, tighter and tighter, until they finally come together in a frayed ending that’s as satisfying as it is genuinely shocking. Freebird contains one of the most moving and not-at-all cheesy depictions of the afterlife I remember reading. Most authors simply don’t go there, but Raymond does. And thank God for that.”—The Los Angeles Review
“Raymond rotates between Anne’s, Ben’s and Aaron’s points of view, his gallows humor and psychological acuity informing the action of every character. . . . His descriptive powers. . . pull you into a kind of sensuous ambiguity that’s as seductive for the reader as it is for his characters. . . . The biggest impression the book leaves is of a novelist reaching the height of his powers.”—The Oregonian
“The arrival of Freebird requires that you set aside all New Year plans and dive in without delay. . . . A darkly relatable amorality tale from a skilled storyteller.”—Portland Monthly
“An original, provocative, and intriguing story. . . . A powerful and tender family drama.”—Publishers Weekly
“Raymond . . . [explores] the qualities that make us human and the strong family bonds that hold us together.”—Booklist
“Jon Raymond’s wonderful new book Freebird poetically wrestles with the big and the small: how globalization and international conflicts reconcile with the personal; how the amorality of war affects individual psyches; how impulsive post adolescence mirrors impulsive old age. And the undercurrent of this increasingly suspenseful story is a fascinating discussion of environmental mutilation, at once a tangle of benign bureaucracy and calculated avarice, which Raymond tackles with equal parts sensitivity and expertise."—Jesse Eisenberg, author of Bream Gives Me Hiccups
“Freebird is such a timely book, considering the current deep divisions between right and left. A new classic for the collapsing political landscape of America.”—Kim Gordon, author of Girl in a Band
“Freebird is an intelligent and absorbing multi-generational story of an American family, written with great sensitivity, insight, and verve.”—Patrick deWitt
“Beautifully written, precisely observed, and morally engaged. In the Singer family, Jon Raymond has composed a kind of generational fugue on the theme of how to do some good in a grim world—how to fight back against evil without compounding that evil.”—Jonathan Dee, author of A Thousand Pardons
“No one writes sentences so graceful and characters so achingly real as Jon Raymond. Sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, oftentimes at the same moment, Freebird is the gripping story of a dysfunctional family through which we better understand these dysfunctional times.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Thrill Me
2016-10-20
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the Holocaust, and civic corruption are just where the troubles begin for one LA family.Anne, the much-put-upon heroine of Raymond's third novel (Rain Dragon, 2012, etc.), is concerned to distraction with three men in her family. Her elderly father, Sam, a Holocaust survivor, resists her efforts to move him into a nursing home; her son, Aaron, is a high school senior with no clear direction; and her brother, Ben, is a former sniper who's returned from the Middle East with obvious psychic damage. Anne doesn't exactly have it together herself: a senior staffer at LA County's Department of Sustainability, she's getting wooed by an entrepreneur eager to rope her into an unethical scheme to privatize the region's wastewater. Raymond gestures toward framing this story as a widescreen study of morality and evil: Aaron goes on a road trip with Sam where a theft unlocks some of grandpa's closely held Auschwitz memories, and Ben's sanity degrades to the point where he begins plotting assassinations of power brokers. But the novel never quite finds that serious tone, some of which is due to the sprawl of the plot, some of which is due to Raymond's knack for breezier, ground-level storytelling—he's at his best when he's skewering LA's bureaucracy ("a centerless hive of back channels and side alleys, pitted with private dungeons") or how Aaron is comically waylaid by a moment of adolescent lust. The novel's big-picture material tends to feature more pretentious, shapeless prose, as when Ben experiences "eyeless, voiceless faces, wavering in the air, shooting razors of pain"—lines that don't quite sell the madness that allegedly consumes the ex-sniper. Each character study is thoughtfully constructed, but the novel is less than the sum of its parts. An ambitious domestic drama that nails the domestic parts but doesn't always sell its drama.
"No one writes sentences so graceful and characters so achingly real as Jon Raymond. Sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, oftentimes at the same moment, Freebird is the gripping story of a dysfunctional family through which we better understand these dysfunctional times."
