AN ODD BIRD

A girl with a special connection to birds hopes to protect a threatened hawk in this middle-grade novel.

For 11-year-old Claire Belle, birds are an obsession. She always wears shirts printed with their images and strives every day to identify new species. Self-conscious about her exceptionally pale skin and hair and yellow-gold eyes, which she conceals with blue contact lenses, Claire also keeps secret her seemingly magical ability to attract whatever bird is depicted on her shirt that day. In the nearby woods, Claire meets Jerry,an unkempt older man with a pet chicken. Through Jerry, Claire learns that a local man illegally shot and stuffed a red-tailed hawk and now plans to kill the bird’s mate, Big Red, an animal Claire feels especially connected to: “Some mystery bound them in spirit.” In working with Jerry to save Big Red, Claire comes to consider him a kind of wizard. He tells her that “birds come to you like an old friend because you are one. You spend much time with them in the Now.” By the novel’s end, he reveals that his purpose is to train Claire in their shared mission of protecting birds. Butler lays the groundwork in this first installment of a trilogy for a story combining ecological awareness with mysticism, the themes nicely linked by the mythic role of birds as spiritual messengers. Readers can also relate to Claire as an insecure outsider who worries about the strength of her friendships, is targeted for bullying, and has trouble adjusting to a recent move. But at times the novel’s voice is too stiffly formal for its tween perspective, as when a mean boy glances “right and left to see whose ears attended his wit.”

An intriguing story of self-discovery that sometimes becomes stilted.