I really liked this. Read it in a day and thought the premise was super interesting and just magical enough for my taste.

I enjoyed this slow-paced, character-focused, queer coming-of-age story. There isn’t a goal-oriented plot, it’s more just about Owen’s life through his childhood and teen years, experiencing things, trying to keep his secret safe, and trying to find his place in the world as someone who is different. There’s a romance in the end, but not a lot of romance throughout. Owen deals with some harsh and realistic struggles, like homophobia and a mother who is pretty neglectful, but the story ends on an imperfect but hopeful note.

This is very much a book about being different and feeling unlovable but wanting love. About feeling like you have to hide your differences, whether because your safety would actually be at risk or because you’re worried what people might think. The bird in Owen’s chest could really symbolize any sort of difference that isn’t bad in and of itself but is made difficult because of other people’s judgment and prejudice. Though probably especially queerness because…

There are a lot of queer characters in this book, including Owen. No specific labels, but some mlm and wlw attraction and relationships, and kind of general queerness and just not super conforming to cishet norms.

The bird in chest element was an important part of the story in that it impacted everything from the plot to Owen’s view of the world and himself, but it was still kind of small and quiet. Presented in a kind of matter-of-fact way. Just part of Owen’s life.

The writing had this sort of floaty feel. Almost kind of hazy. A style that worked well for a book about a character who is sheltered and then thrust into a socially/emotionally-disorienting situation. (Owen had schooling until high school and spent his life before that confined to his house with just his mom and bird.)

I have mixed feelings about the characters and relationships. Except for Owen (and maybe even a little bit Owen), they felt kinda flat. It could make sense from Owen’s POV, maybe he just didn’t know them super well, but I would’ve liked to know the character he was supposedly in love with a bit better. (I at least knew the love interest enough to know he was gentle and sweet.) The more I think about it, the more it feels like this was a solitary, in-his-own-head kind of story. I can remember time Owen spent with people that was kinda summarized, and other time that was more drawn-out and detailed but Owen was mostly in his thoughts and feelings. That could’ve been a purposeful choice by the author though, or I could be forgetting, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Owen didn’t seem to have a lot of strong bonds, and even some of the bonds he felt strongest were stretched and frayed.

There’s a lot you have to overlook though, a lot of suspension of disbelief, and it’s not just the whole “open chest, exposed organs that somehow never get infected, bird that talks but never eats” thing. It was also some nonsensical character decisions (like everything Owen’s mother did, though I guess sometimes people in real life do do nonsensical things) and unusual things being unquestioned by characters or not explained to the reader (like how Owen got enrolled in high school with no previous education, or how he got inhalers for his asthma if he never went to doctors).

Note: There’s teenage drinking and drug use, as well as some semi-explicit sex scenes (kind of like a summary more than super detailed).

And a few notes to clear up any genre confusion: I’ve seen the author say the book is not sci-fi/fantasy. However, people in real life don’t have giant holes in their chests with talking birds in them, so I still consider it a subgenre of fantasy. Possibly magical realism, since it takes place in a world where a lot of people have animals inside their bodies, and though they’re not exactly accepted, it’s a known thing. Also, the book is listed as “transgender fiction” on Amazon, but, though the author is trans and the bird in Owen’s chest may be a metaphor, there were no explicitly trans characters. Last but not least, although the book is about a teen, it’s not YA.

Overall, a somewhat bittersweet but hopeful novel about a sheltered boy with a bird in his chest coming of age, exploring his queerness, being different, and finding his place in the world.

I really enjoyed the magical realism aspect of this book. It certainly had a big metaphor about identity, often seen in coming of age novels. It was a beautiful book that I think even younger readers would enjoy.

While this isn't my usual type of book, the synopsis caught my eye. I'm really glad I read it.

Owen Tanner has a bird in his chest. He was born with it. The bird has a name too "Gail" Owen longs to have a normal life
Because of his condition, his mother had hidden him away from the world. But then after a small disaster, Owen's secret is discovered and he has to go back into hiding.

This is a wonderful story about accepting who you are and how your thoughts and postivity can really shine through and come off to other people.

This was a heartwarming tale about coming of age and I truly did enjoy it.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc!

Slightly metaphorical, full of found-family feels and lots of magical realism. This was a delightful read from start to finish, with such great characters.

I’m tired and I have elective surgery tomorrow, so this is bite-sized!

- Magical realism
- It’s a metaphor about identity
- Weird dialogue tbh
- Feels like a Haruki Murakami book? Crossed with a Neil Gaiman book?

Not super sure I liked it? Also not really sure if I disliked it? Three stars? Three and a half stars. Rounded up for NetGalley.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. I tore through this book, even though I am not typically a fantasy/magical realism fan. Or at least I am in small doses, where the premise of this book, as evidenced by the title, is a massive dose of magical. That said, I felt so deeply for all the characters and couldn't put this one down. A fantastic parable of being a unique human in the world.

I love found family books, coming of age tales, and I love some magical realism, so I found The Boy with a Bird in His Chest to be an absolute delight. This book is about identity in all its forms, and I never wanted it to end. This is a VERY promising debut, and I will be keeping an eye out for what Emme Lund publishes next.

Emme Lund’s debut novel has stuck with me since I finished it.

Owen was born with a bird in his chest. He and the bird, Gail, made themselves small most of his life until, as a young teen, he began taking small steps to see the world outside his house with Gail. Owen’s mom had always told him to hide Gail from the outside world, but slowly his secret comes out and Owen must learn to balance his life.

I loved Owen and Gail. They are so well written and really pulled at my heartstrings. Anyone who has ever felt a little bit different from everyone around them will feel the same way: seen and understood. And you will probably cry.

Trigger warnings for sexuality and bullying.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Emme Lund’s debut novel, The Boy with a Bird in His Chest, is a deeply ambivalent, sometimes-allegorical queer coming-of-age story. Owen Tanner has a hole in his chest: his organs (including his heart) have dutifully moved aside and around the hole to allow space for Gail, the talking java sparrow who lives inside his ribcage.

When Owen is born, there isn’t a bird in his chest, but the hole there and the fact that he is alive in spite of it make him a prime target for study. Owen’s mother, Janice, sees the doctors eager to study her son as greedy and inhumane, and takes her son home, where she hopes he will pass away in peace. Instead, he continues to live, and several days later a baby bird appears in his chest. She’s been there ever since. Janice is paranoid that her son will be stolen away from her to be experimented on, so she hides him away, and he spends his entire childhood and teenage years isolated from human contact. The story proper begins in Owen’s teenage years, shortly before he is spirited away from his home and placed in hiding with his uncle and cousin. In the opening of the book, a flash-forward, Owen is on the road, hitchhiking towards the Golden Gate bridge, where he plans to end his own life.

The book’s heart is (ironically) in the right place. There are some genuinely warm moments as Owen finds connections with new friends and family, and powerful ones when Owen feels visible: my favorite line in the book was Owen’s triumphant “My name is Owen. I have a bird who lives inside my chest. She’s always been there.” Gail the sparrow, funny and caring — sometimes even maternal — gives the story life, and the story’s magical elements are the most interesting parts. I don’t doubt that this could be a meaningful journey for a young queer person, or for someone open-minded but naïve to the difficulty young queer people encounter in everyday life.

The writing, though, leaves a lot to be desired: it is repetitive and somewhat awkward, especially in dialogue, where a lack of contractions makes characters seem stiff and oddly formal (always “I am,” never “I’m,” etc.). In my experience, people simply don’t talk this way. Certain stock phrases reappear too frequently. It seems questionable to me to bill the novel as literary fiction.

There’s a lot to be said for the confusion between allegory and reality, too, because the book confronts Owen’s navigation of queer young-adulthood simultaneously with his struggle to survive as a medical marvel, a person many would consider to be a monstrosity.

All of the action — the most compelling parts — takes place in the outer segments, probably the first and last fifths of the book. These are the sections that detail Owen’s flight from Morning, Montana to his uncle’s home in Washington, and later his attempt to escape Washington to go to California, where he plans to end his own life. These parts focus on the real danger Owen is in, of being captured by doctors or government officials — the people his mother refers to as the “Army of Acronyms” due to the abbreviated names of various medical degrees and government organizations. Then, in the bulk of the book, the focus is on Owen’s queerness and his desire to find his identity; the threat of death and experimentation fade into the background, and the story’s conflicts are suddenly literal instead of allegorical: bullying, young love, the desire to fit in, a backwards, small-town community that isn’t accepting of LGBTQ folks. The result is a structure that feels split between Owen’s typical teenage woes and actual threats to his life, and a middle section that feels incongruent and far too long.

Are the Army of Acronyms supposed to be taken at face-value — the doctors, government officials, and other cynical and menacing adults out to steal Owen away to experiment on him? It’s unclear, because Lund also flirts with the idea of treating them metaphorically, a representation of all of the people who refuse to accept Owen (or queer people in general) for who they are. This makes the resolution to this arm of the plot even more bizarre: after the relentless anxiety Owen faces for the entirety of the book, the entire problem is waved away through a deus-ex-machina type solution that leaves the reader to wonder if the entire thing couldn’t have been solved years and years ago. Owen can’t figure out if Janice’s incessant paranoia is justified, and Lund doesn’t seem to know, either.

Owen’s recurring obsession with the ocean seems to be another way to indicate his lack of belonging with the rest of the world. He has a dream of living in the undersea world of The Little Mermaid, essentially a tale about longing to be a part of a world inherently hostile to you and incompatible with your physical body. At times, the water and Owen’s longing for it seem to be a kind of symbolic buzzword for his otherness. This makes it all the more confusing that The Little Mermaid’s ocean doubles as Owen’s planned method of suicide, leaving me confused as to what Lund is trying to say. When Owen turns away from his death at the Golden Gate Bridge, what, exactly, is he turning away from?

The thing I found most interesting in the story was Lund’s very creative “terrors,” the magical-realist construction of people who have animals living inside them. The idea is mostly used to suggest the idea of queerness — having to hide a real part of yourself from the rest of the world, etc. — but Lund also dips into talking about it more literally in the world she has created: these people are known to exist, spoken about online and in textbooks. Towards the end, another specific example is given: Owen reads about a boy with a cricket in his thigh. The interactions between Owen and Gail are so interesting, and feel magical and fantastic in the best ways. I would have loved to meet more characters like this — what would the cricket be like? How do others get along with the animals inside them? Since the boy and bird depend on each other mutually — if one dies, so does the other — there is plenty of room to discuss the implications of conflict between the creatures. I would have loved to read an underground magic story about these terrors, something in the vein of Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

Owen meets two others like him, but never has any interaction with them. Both times Owen is in physical proximity to another “terror” are exciting and make us wonder what kinds of lives these people lead — but Lund doesn’t follow through. I am certainly willing to believe this could be leveraged for some meaningful observation — the solidarity with the others that Owen feels, even though he never speaks to them — but I was instead left wondering, as I was many times, what exactly Lund was trying to achieve.

Owen’s conflict with his mother Janice is particularly frustrating; he grows wary of her incessant paranoia and “crazy talk,” but doesn’t seem willing or able to think about his resentment for his mother until the very end of the book, where he confronts her. He tells her he’s angry, and tells her plainly how he feels about the things she did; she apologizes tearfully and says she’s not perfect. That’s the end of that part of the conversation; then they talk about Owen’s love life and laugh at a silly joke. Owen leaves to go do other stuff and doesn’t really think about it anymore. The entire affair is another instance of Lund’s apparent lack of conviction; for almost the entire book, Janice is built up as an unwittingly abusive mother, suffering from grievous mental illness and likely alcoholism, but in the end she is portrayed in an almost exclusively sympathetic light. I got the sense that it was Lund, not Owen, who was forgiving Janice for her treatment of her son.

The Boy with a Bird in His Chest tries to create a fantastical, magical-realist landscape in which to explore questions of identity and belonging. Unfortunately, it lacks commitment to its own ideas, and its mixture allegory and reality creates a confusion at odds with the message of confidence in oneself and one’s identity.

Thank you, Atria Books, for allowing me to read The Boy with a Bird in His Chest early!

Emme Lund's exceptional debut destroyed me in the best of ways. I couldn't stop reading. I simply needed to read how the story went and I finished this book in one sitting. It is not anything rare with me as I often finish books in one sitting, but I want to clarify this was different. Lund's prose was so rich in emotions and I often found myself wiping the corners of my watery eyes. Simply splendid.

Owen, the boy and Gail the bird that lives in his chest, are secret friends. Hiding and running from terror, choosing when to disclose and when to keep silent. How amazing a tale of a boy who is different, he has a bird in his chest. Who can he tell? I was overcome with empathy (and a bit of sympathy) for Owen—who of us hasn’t had a secret that they wanted to get off their chest and yet didn’t know whom to trust? These characters are so authentic and touching that the reader wants to meet them. When Owen then discovers his true sexual identity, we wonder if Gail was symbolic of that secret he kept hidden and which others wanted to persecute him for? Perhaps. But wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a bird in your chest who can speak and keep you company all the time and give you life lessons in troubling situations? May we all find a bird in our hearts and let it speak to us. A must read coming of age tale that will inspire the reader and infuse a bit of magic into their life.

The Boy with a Bird in his Chest by Emme Lund is a beautiful and often times tragic modern day coming of age story. Exactly as it’s title describes a boy named Owen is born with a hole in his chest, where a bird named Gail will one day inhabit. She will become his companion, confidant, and driving force. This is a magical ride through hiding our true selves and finding one’s place in this yworld, when it often feels like everyone and everything is out to get you. It centers around found family, mental health struggles and what it means to want to give up in face of adversity while trying to live authentically. You can’t help but feel emphatic towards Owen and wanting to prove to him that life itself, no matter how big or small the moments are can still be beautiful. Emme Lund weaves such magic and heart into the characters of Owen and Gail, bringing them to life with such metamorphic gumption, it’s truly fantastic. This book had me so confused in the the best way, where I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t care. All I wanted was for it to keep pursuing and by the end I was left with a soft appreciation of contentment. Well done!

How would you feel if you had to hide an important -- no, the most vital -- part of yourself from the world? That's the question that Emme Lund seems to take head on in her debut novel "The Boy with a Bird in His Chest." This mystical realistic story captured my heart with the main character, Owen, and the funny little bird, Gail, who lives inside his chest and was just always there. Owen grows up very sheltered because his mother fears that if anyone finds out about Gail, he will be deemed a Terror and be taken away from her to be researched and experimented on by the aptly named Army of Acronyms (doctors, police, and other authority figures) . So this boy grows up not going outside or interacting with the world until he's a teenager and his mother sends him away after an emergency to live with his Uncle and cousin in Oregon. There Owen learns about the world, friendship, and gains the ability to trust others and share himself and his most private secrets for the first time ever.

This is not your typical coming-of-age story and I love that. The fantastical qualities around Gail and the conspiracies that Owen's mom raises him with will keep you guessing throughout the book. Is the Army of Acronyms actually a threat or has Owen's mother convinced him to believe in conspiracy theories that will consume his mind and cause him to constantly look over his shoulder? As Owen explores his sexual identity and comes out of his shell he will experience fears and challenges and not know whether it's because he's gay or because he's a Terror. But he won't go through this alone thanks to his cousin Tennessee, who is by far my favorite character in the book. She is sassy and carefree and challenges Owen to open himself up to others and to truly be himself. How far will he take that advice? Will he share his secrets beyond his cousin? Will the people he begins to trust let him down or show up for him?

If you enjoy literary fiction or coming-of-age stories, you will love this book with its fresh, modern take on a timeless theme.

The Boy with the Bird in His Chest is an excellent example of a coming of age novel with a magical realism twist. Owen was born with a hole in his chest and a few days later a small bird, Gail, appeared in the empty space. His mother has kept him inside most of his life, protecting him from the doctors, scientists, and others in the Army of Acronyms who would love to get their hands on him for experimentation. However, after an emergency trip to the doctor’s office goes very wrong, Owen’s life is turned upside down. For the first time he’s living away from his mother, with his uncle and cousin, and has to figure out all over again how to feel safe, who to trust, and who to love.

I loved how Owen’s feelings about his surroundings are shown as complex and changing. There is never just one reaction to a situation and he is allowed to swing between feeling safe, feeling scared, feeling numb, and everything in between. I also loved seeing him develop a relationship with his cousin. They learn to trust each other, but also fight and feel distant. More than anything, though, they really love each other for who they are. This novel truly expresses what it feels like to grow up. Even if the exact experiences are different, I think readers can connect to Owen on a deep level. He is sweet and kind, but can also be cruel and unthinking, just like any other teenager. And Gail is an interesting counter to Owen. She is at times the “adult” responsible voice telling him the best or safest course of action. She is at other times sullen and moody and puts her own interests above Owen’s. Gail grows along with Owen and I enjoyed seeing their interactions evolve.

What a creative and imaginatively designed coming of age story. Emma Lund wrote with such vivid imagery which is largely why I was able to grab ahold of the story and hold on the ride even when it was kind of a stretch. It wasn't at all what I was expecting and yet it was still a wonderful story. Thank you so much for a chance to read this in exchange for my honest opinion.

Yes, I normally read mysteries and thrillers, but the premise of this book just captivated me immediately. This was absolutely beautiful! Fair warning - this book covers a lot of sensitive topics such as gender identity, bullying, and family drama. I loved the magic realism touch to this story, and honestly was so impressed that this was a debut novel by the author. I cannot wait for more to come!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Rating: 4/5 stars

THE BOY WITH A BIRD IN HIS CHEST is a part magical realism/part coming-of-age novel about Owen Tanner, a boy who has a bird in his chest. Literally. Taught his whole life to hide the bird from the world, Owen must eventually learn how to exist in a world where he will always be different, but just might fit in anyway.

I’m going to go ahead and predict that this will not be the last we hear from Emme Lund. THE BOY WITH A BIRD IN HIS CHEST is a moving, captivating, at times extraordinarily funny and always extraordinarily touching exploration of memorable characters—Owen, his bird Gail, his cousin Tennessee, his uncle Bob, his mother Janice, and a supporting cast of others I won’t name due to spoilers. As with any sprawling coming-of-age novel, the pace was occasionally a bit slow, but there were surprisingly exhilarating moments sprinkled throughout.

Whether the bird is an allegory for anything (Being trans? Being elsewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum? Something else?) is unclear, though likely, but honestly that didn’t matter nearly so much as the story itself. I’m entirely sure this will wind up being one of the most inventive and creative things I’ve read all year—and possibly ever.

Recommended for anyone, but especially those who like: LGBTQ+ characters; coming-of-age stories; magical realism.

CW: Suicidal thoughts; homophobia (including targeted violence); abandonment; mentions of racism.

This book is so special. One of the most unique books I've every read, The Boy with a Bird in HIs Chest follows a boy who literally has a bird in his chest that he has to hide. A magical realism literary fiction novel, I would say this book is fantastic for fiction, especially queer. This book is powerful and stunning and I loved it. I will be featuring this on my page.

Absolutely beautiful, emotional, and unique. Owen was born with a bird in his chest and a mother who loves him fiercely. There is so much to love about this book and so much to cry for. I will hold this book close to me forever. Thank you NetGalley!