Book review - A Many Feathered Thing

Title: A Many Feathered Thing
Author: Lisa Gerlits
Genre: realistic fiction
Similar books: Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake
                      The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall
Rating:

lovely

Summary (provided by publisher): Eleven-year-old Clara is known as the "girl who draws," but she's not tortured enough to become a real artist. Her only suffering, besides embarrassment over her real name Clarity Kartoffel, German for Clarity Potato is a crippling inability to speak in public. When Clara and her oldest friend, Orion break their neighbor's glass gazing ball, Clara decides that in order to suffer like a true artist, she will do every hard thing in her path . . . starting with knocking on scary old Mr. Vogelman's door. That's when she meets "Birdman." That’s when she sees his swirling painting. And that's when everything changes. To pay for the broken glass ball, Clara begins working for Birdman in his atelier. He challenges her to throw away her eraser and draw what she sees, not what she wants to see. But as Clara discovers, seeing, really seeing is hard. Almost as difficult as befriending the new girl at school, or navigating awkward feelings for Orion or finding the courage to speak in front of the entire class. But little does Clara know, the biggest challenges are yet to come. To cope with tragedy, she will have to do more than be brave. As Birdman teaches her, she will have to "bring the hope."

My opinion: Let's get this out of the way: the general thrust of this plot is going to be entirely predictable to the average reader. In this case, the events are not really the point. This one is all about the characters and their individual journeys. We struggle along with Clara, feeling her pain and sense of inadequacy, her excitement over finding a mentor and her increasing confusion and complication with Orion. We know, instinctively, that she is making all the wrong choices. We even get the sense that she knows it as well. And yet, her choices seem inevitable, a necessary part of adolescence. It's a very realistic journey, painful and awkward, as Clara's lessons in art teach her more about interacting with other people. Gerlits has managed to create a straightforward story that can relay a number of lessons to the reader, one that will hold up to repeat reads.

More information: A Many Feathered Thing releases March 2.
Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley