The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

The Nature of Small Birds invites readers into the lives of a "normal" American family and the effects of the Vietnam war over the course of multiple generations and through the eyes of various narrators.

Before this particular novel I was more or less unfamiliar with Susie Finkbeiner and her work and I'll admit it took me a little while to adjust to her writing style (Oh how my tired brain would have loved a family tree at the beginning of the book to help me sort out Bruce, Linda, and Sonny as the narrators), eventually I fell in love though.

One of the strongest aspects of Finkbeiner's work is her ability to capture the emotional aspects of her plot for good and for bad. While Sonny is a bit older than myself the nostalgia as Finkbeiner captures the pop culture aspects of her growing up with PBS before moving to malls and movie theaters, I was amazed at how easily my mind was able to capture their world thanks to Finkbeiner's inclusion of these pop details.

Finkbeiner also knows how to handle more serious emotions with a careful and delicate touch, you can see her heart and research going into the scenes where Mindy is processing the emotions surrounding her involvement in operation babylift. I quickly grew to love Finkbeiner's heartbreaking honesty when it comes to life and loss as you saw it throughout the adoption journey as well as with Mindy's adopted uncles time in Vietnam and the effects on them and their loved ones.

I also appreciated how Finkbeiner doesn't try to wrap the story up neatly into a tidy ending, she acknowledges some losses and some messes are too big and too complicated to tidily fix in 356 pages. Some characters get an honest ending instead and I feel like that's truer to the story that was being told one that wasn't finished, wasn't resolved but also one that wasn't devoid of hope.

While it hasn't been terribly long since I finished it, The Nature of Small Birds feels like one of those books that just sticks with a reader popping up in their mind from time to time, something I'm not opposed to in the least.

 4.5 out of 5 stars

"Book has been provided courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications, Inc."