Book review - Wild Bird

 

Title: Wild Bird

Author: Diane Zahler

Genre: historical fiction

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Rating:

 

well written but a hard sell

Summary (provided by publisher): Her name was Rype. That wasn’t really her name. It was what the strangers called her. She didn’t remember her real name. She didn’t remember anything at all.
Rype was hiding in the hollow of a tree trunk when they found her. She was hungry, small, cold, alone. She did not speak their language, or understand their mannerisms. But she knew this: To survive, she would have to go with them.
In fourteenth-century Norway, the plague has destroyed the entire village of Skeviga. To stay alive, Rype, the only one left, must embark on a sweeping adventure across Europe with the son of an English ship captain and a band of troubadours in search of a brighter future and a new home.

My opinion: Plague stories can make for pretty compelling reading, especially when it comes to the Black Death. It was a major source of fear, killing quickly and indiscriminately. So we start with Rype, the sole survivor of a plague struck village. She experiencing a world falling apart in every direction as people respond in fear to the threat of illness. So it is a book about a physical journey as well as a personal search for a way to move forward. It is absolutely beautifully written, balancing moments of beauty and joy with absolute destruction and loss. The historical context can make it a bit of a hard sell and the lack of a central thesis, a message that the reader can take from the text, makes for a slow, meandering read.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley