What a strange, delightful little book. It's extremely hard to describe this book in a review. The book's narrator is recovering from one life-changing event -- a violent attack in her workplace -- and on the verge of another -- her wedding. Marie-Helene Bertino's writing is absolutely staggering. I'll be buying a hard copy of this ASAP so I can underline a million different passages that struck me.

A beautiful gem of a novel. Surreal and imaginative. I enjoyed the exploration of human transformation and found the writing to be charming.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s third book, Parakeet, is almost impossible to describe. In some places, the novel is darkly funny, as it points out the ordinary absurdities and hardships of life; in others, it descends into what feels like a fever dream. On the surface, the plot is simple: a woman, known only as the Bride, is about to get married. Her groom is caring, stable, and brings her a sense of normalcy, but she isn’t sure that she loves him. Parakeet follows the Bride in the days leading up to and following the wedding.

But Bertino brings a lot more to the table than a just a love story gone wrong. The novel’s strangeness is apparent from page one, when the Bride sees a parakeet in her hotel room and instantly recognizes it as a manifestation of her dead grandmother. “What is the Internet?” the bird asks. The bird and the Bride discuss the upcoming wedding; the bird is skeptical about the Bride’s compatibility with the groom and insists that she needs to find her estranged brother, Tom. When the bird leaves, the Bride finds that it has defecated all over her wedding dress.

Searching for Tom, the Bride discovers that her sibling is a trans woman who now lives as Simone. Most of the second half of the novel focuses on the rebuilding of the relationship between the Bride and Simone, who had fallen out years earlier. Once reunited, the sisters begin to make sense of their connection to one another and to their difficult mother. The quiet conversations they have together, rather than the Bride’s catastrophic wedding or the surreal events surrounding it, turn out to be the novel’s heart.

Along the way, however, we encounter some truly bizarre misunderstandings. One morning the Bride becomes convinced that she is inhabiting the body of her mother. She also thinks that the woman who sells her a wedding dress looks exactly like her. There are strained conversations and strange fart jokes, and too often the novel’s weirdness has no discernible purpose, seeming only to distract from the story’s emotional force.

More effective are the novel’s funny one-liners. These aren’t always jokes but rather moments of levity when the characters are most stressed. “Dear god, the ass. Inherited from my grandmother, that immortal spread,” laments the Bride. Bertino tends to poke fun at the inelegance of middle age and social oddities that are often overlooked or taken for granted. These moments help to lighten a novel that fundamentally deals with terrorism, identity, and dysfunctional family relationships.

The best parts of the novel are the occasional poignant moments. “Have you ever missed someone so much that the missing gains form, becomes an extra thing welded to you, like a cumbersome limb you must carry?” the Bride asks her parakeet-grandmother, thinking of Simone. The parakeet’s response is dismissive—“Dramatic,” she says dryly—but the novel does not dismiss the Bride’s pain. Bertino’s understated portrayal of the difficult parts of life are what make the book worth reading, despite the many distracting tangents of body swapping and misidentification.

Each of the novel’s final chapters wraps up one of the story lines: the Bride’s relationships with the groom, her mother, her sister, and her dead grandmother. Though touching, these chapters feel like serial attempts at a perfect ending rather than a cohesive finale, reflecting the novel’s scattered attention.

This is one of the most creative and beautiful books I've read in a long time. I adored each chapter (some short, some not so short). The troubled narrator in Marie-Helene Bertino's novel takes us into her story piece by piece, and parakeet by parakeet, probably the only way she can. Bertino uses clever language and lots of humor to help us, and her character, understand the pain and trauma she has been through, and to experience real joy, which both the characters and reader do at the end. I loved this. Now to read it again a little more slowly ...

A laugh-out-loud book that at its heart is about sibling love. In a story that begins with a bride’s dead grandmother visiting her on the eve of her wedding in the form of a parakeet, Bertino pokes fun at the wedding-industrial complex in the M.C. Escher-esque suburban hellscape that is literally a Long Island bed and breakfast and figuratively The Bride’s own jumbled insides.

It is such a trip reading this tonally hilarious book, when you can also share in the author's predicament, at least, in some sense. I read this when I was also experiencing my grandmother's death, though I don't really believe in ghosts, so my experience felt more freighted with traumatic feelings. There's a funny bit at the beginning about technology and the internet, which is always a funny set-up — old people using technology. Unlike the narrator, I wasn't about to be married. I've met the author, who mentioned she used to conduct interviews for court cases, and I can see how that relates to her writing style, which feels a bit confrontational, a bit conversational. I also handed this book to a patron who said they were really looking forward to reading it!

Our narrator, "The Bride", is merely floating through life, her wedding day to "The Groom" approaching rapidly. This changes when her grandmother visits her hotel room in the form of a parakeet, urging her to look for her estranged brother, but assures she will not find him. It's true, she does not find her brother-- but she does find a sister: Simone. As they reconnect, The Bride begins rethinking the path she is hurtling down, and whether or not she can take control of what she really wants. I was completely engrossed in Parakeet, a truly a novel for the ages, here to make one pause and think about just where they are headed. Is it what you want for yourself, or is it all an illusion to please? Fantastically written.

Parakeet is about the way trauma shapes us, about love between sisters, it's about trying to understand your place in the world. It's also about a dead grandmother coming back as a parakeet to poop on a bride's dress. It really contains multitudes. Parakeet follows a bride the week of her wedding as she grapples with whether or not she should follow the parakeet's advice and not get married. I loved this book - it's absolutely beautiful, and has the most wrenching (and real) depiction of a friendship breaking up that I've ever read. It's also really funny. Highly, highly recommended.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 2, 2020

Luna is living an unusual life. While awaiting transportation in an ambulance, she watches a woman remove her shoes and place them in a mailbox, unless this is something she might have imagined. Her grandmother has been reincarnated as a bird, or so it seems to her. She is getting married to “the groom” if she decides to go through with it, but her grandmother-bird crapped all over her wedding dress so she needs to find another one. Every time the elevator door opens in the building where she plans to wed, she steps out onto the same floor. Stairs are no better because there are more flights of stairs than the building has floors. A diner turns into a ship sailing on the waves of the stock market, although Luna might have dreamt that one.

After a long estrangement, Luna reunites with her brother Tom, a former addict, and learns that Tom is now Simone, who holds a “woman’s grace and the person I used to know’s ability to entertain with an offhand gesture. She is simultaneous.” Tom/Simone wrote a successful play about Luna’s life called Parakeet and used the earnings to finance the first phase of a sex transition. Compared to the rest of Luna's life, her brother returning as a woman “is the only thing that makes sense.”

Luna wakes up with a hangover one morning and discovers that she has physically transformed into her mother. This doesn’t surprise Tom/Simone, who realizes that “sooner or later every woman wakes up and realizes she is her mother.” Fortunately, the physical transformation is short-term.

What are we to make of Luna? Her name suggests a character who is mentally troubled and her observations suggest an unreliable narrator. Yet she seems quite sane, or no less insane than most people who are on the verge of getting married. In the story’s second half, we learn about a formative trauma while Luna was a bit younger that clearly affected her life, but questions remain about what is real and what is delusion. Luna hears on a radio program that stories should not start with “Once upon a time” but with “This never happened,” perhaps a reminder that fiction can do violence to a reader’s understanding of reality because none of it real.

“Will Luna get married or not?” is a broad description of the plot, to the extent that one exists. Some of her mishaps might be interpreted as the manifestation of a desire to remain unwed. There may be good reason for Luna to avoid marriage. While the story has surrealistic moments, it is anchored in the reality of family. Luna is marrying into a conventional family. The groom’s mother secretly (and then openly) scorns her as a “brown gypsy.” Luna avoids her groom’s perfect family because it makes her yearn for her own, messed-up family. “And then I’d have to acknowledge that I was missing incorrect, anxious freaks, and that I was one of them. People with good families can’t fathom those without. Or that we don’t want to borrow theirs.” Parakeet reminds us that there are no good families or bad families. There are only our families.

We do not choose to be born into a family, but marriage is about making a family, and marriage is a voluntary choice. Even if it seems destined or the right thing to do, we can always decide that marrying and becoming a family, in general or with a particular person, is not something we want. The choice Luna will make is uncertain as she approaches and endures her wedding day. The resolution might or might not be seen as a happy ending, but happiness is a matter of perspective.

At the novel’s end, Luna wonders whether she is a good person. She thinks the answer depends on who you ask. Simone agrees and tells her “so you better be careful who you ask.” Readers might have different opinions about whether Luna is a good person. She is clearly a troubled person. Maybe she doesn’t always make wise choices. But when it counts, including standing up for Simone’s right to stop being Tom, she proves that she has a good heart.

The novel is ultimately about finding yourself and being open to the possibility that what you find might later change. “Tiny, inconsequential shifts” in the path your life takes produce “unexpected vistas” and each shift causes you “to make room for yourself again and again.” Parakeet is charming in its oddness and wise in the lessons it teaches.

RECOMMENDED

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

My subconscious has at least ten working active planes. One conducts everyday business hands money to the ticket girl. Designs appropriate responses to banal conversations. On the daydream plane I receive an award for courage, take my seat, am called on stage to receive it again. On another, an endless film of regrets: I refuse the childhood girl who wanted to be friends because her ugliness scared me. A boy gifts me tickets to a concert to which I take another boy. In the childhood plane my mother looks up at my entrance to a room and her expression remains unchanged.-- and she goes on like this

PARAKEET is a delight. Also, she was able to articulate the sadness and loss of a close female friendship in such an achingly accurate way.

https://artsfuse.org/204743/book-review-parakeet-a-wild-constellation/

I don't give stars --

Drew Hart
Santa Barbara

In this inventive novel, the Bride is visited by her late grandmother in the form of a parakeet the week of her wedding. She is directed to find her long lost brother and is surprised at the person she finds. Bertino creates a cast of complex characters and readers are truly in the head of the narrator who seems unreliable from the beginning until you learn more and more about her life. Fans of the magical realism of Aimee Bender and Kevin Wilson will find this novel a compelling and fresh take on the genre.

Beautiful and surreal. Warm and poingnant. A peek into a young woman's life as she faces one of the biggest changes in her life. Curl up with this wonderfully told story and prepare to be dazzled. Not to be missed . A must read. Happy reading!

Stunning, odd, and magical. I have never underlined some many passages in a book—the words undid me at every turn. This is powerful and painful and healing to read, and highly recommended for people who enjoy fabulism or magical realism. Of particular interest to fans of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender.

I honestly don't know how to describe this except to say that it's definitely interesting. Four days before her wedding, a bride (known only as The Bride) is visited by a parakeet, which she believes is actually her grandmother. The grandmother tells her not to get married but to instead find her brother, a famous reclusive playwright from whom she's long been estranged. Things go kind of off the rails from there as the bride deals with wedding details and tries to get in contact with the brother. It's a bit of a wild ride, with some parts that will make you laugh and others that will make you shake her head and still others that will make you wonder how Bertino came up with this. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

The Bride awakens, four days before the wedding, in a luxury Inn on, not in, Long Island. What follows is her journey to the altar and beyond, with her history particularly the root of her traumas, spooling out in a precise, measured way. Marie-Helene Bertino is an amazing writer. I remember being blown away by her short stories, but this novel is in a class by itself. There is so much fine writing with such acute observation that it's difficult to pick an example: ("With a gaze, she could lift me older." "...like every night is Saturday night. But most of life is Wednesday afternoon, and no one thinks that's meaningful.") I'll just stop with those two since I could plant quotes from every page and still not do her credit. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read go her first novel which I somehow missed.

I loved 2am at the Cat’s Pajamas and couldn’t wait for the author’s latest. This entire novel takes place in the week before the narrator’s wedding. A quirky and charming novel. Occasionally, the narrative gets a little hard to follow but overall a pick.