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Birdbrain

Virginia Arthur (Goodreads Author)

4.20 · Rating details · 41 ratings · 17 reviews

2014 Recommended List, Santa Cruz, CA Bookshop.
2015 "Honorable Mention" in "Wild Card" Category, SF Book Fest.

Genre/Major Influences: "comedic-drama", eco-fiction, snark fiction, women's, environmental, western travel, romance, humor, coming-of-age, societal, political, commentary. Snarky, edgy, political eco-fiction that includes profanity. (I'm not shittin' ya').

In resp 2014 Recommended List, Santa Cruz, CA Bookshop.
2015 "Honorable Mention" in "Wild Card" Category, SF Book Fest.

Genre/Major Influences: "comedic-drama", eco-fiction, snark fiction, women's, environmental, western travel, romance, humor, coming-of-age, societal, political, commentary. Snarky, edgy, political eco-fiction that includes profanity. (I'm not shittin' ya').

In response to more than a few sexist comments/reviews mostly from women on how "edgy" this book is (again, leading me to agree with the agent who told me to publish it as a man; I was offended but she was right. I would not be receiving this feedback if I had published it as a man (J.K. Rowling, you're were right on)), not all female authors have to be puffy, soft, Barbara Kingsolver! Women are allowed to be edgy too! (Gosh, really?). Please cut it out with this! Don't read this book if you dislike profanity, snark, and political edges and if you do read it, please don't post a review that it had too much snark, profanity, and political edges! You were warned. I read Bukowski! That should say enough right there!

Edward Abbey, Tom Robbins, John Irving, Rachel Carson, T.C. Boyle, J.D. Salinger, Pam Houston, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, many others within this "vein".

Go Ahead. Love Your Planet. Just Not Too Much.

Set in the late 1970's, early '80's, the so-called dawn of the American Environmental "Movement", in Part I, Pretty Ellowyn Kelsey is a redneck girl living the pretty redneck life in rural Michigan. This includes waiting for her roofer husband to come around, maybe notice the new curtains she put up, or even the flowers in her hair. Her self-imposed lobotomy ends simply enough--she shows up at the wrong time for a church picnic and ends up with a bunch of birders. Peering through a pair of borrowed binoculars, she realizes the love between a mating pair of bluebirds is more profound than what she shares with the bonehead she's married to. Something in her breaks.

She's young, naive, and despite that everyone else around her recognizes what she is going through, she doesn't--until the depth of her pain and emotion holds her captive. She doesn't understand it, the end of her empty marriage and she really did try to cuss less though hanging around with her best friend Patty didn't help. What did he want from her exactly? Did he even love her? Everyone knew her marriage to Eddie was doomed before she did. How can she be the last to know? She is indignant, hurt. She has no idea how to process the emotional sideswipe. Her loss and pain is expressed through the crazy narcissistic melodrama of youth, justified or not. Her reluctant yet unabashed accomplice is Patty.

Part II finds her experiencing yet another major loss. This time, it forces her to grow up, evaluate. She finds refuge in nature, in her birds, in science, making true her mother's prediction--a chasm may form someday between her new and old life, between she and Patty. Her new life is about ecology, birding, nature, science--getting out of her rural town, maybe even going to college. As the narcissism of her youth, her "prior" life wears off, so grows the divide between the people in her town. She starts to care about something bigger than herself (God forbid!)--her ailing planet. This only serves to amuse the "rednecks and assorted white trash" of her rural town who waste no time labeling her as their own "token environmental wacko".

She stays focused. She loves ecology, birds, but wait a minute, what's that strip mall doing there? She meets Kate, one of the first female biologists to be hired by the state Fish and Game Department. In addition to enduring her role as a trailblazer in a male-dominated profession (i.e. the spontaneous massages, etc.), Kate has spent her life fighting to "protect the environment". It hasn't really worked out. Kate's really angry and nobody likes Kate. Who wants to end up like Kate? Is this the price you pay for caring about something bigger than yourself? Ellie wonders if she shouldn't head back to the fart jokes, Foosball,and Budweiser; but the barbecues just aren't as much fun anymore. She meets someone at one of those infamous barbecues. He likes her. She runs like hell, and she keeps running, to the other side of country.

She leaves her boring rural life in Michigan to travel "out west" where she has some very unexpected experiences that include roaming spirits in the desert, accidental crusades against development at her sister's place in San Diego, geographically diverse sexual encounters that include a "real cowboy" and a "real Indian", a Miwok/Paiute BLM park ranger out of Mono Lake. Then there are those amazing sandhill cranes--and who is this guy in my tent?

She can't dodge it try as she may--the inevitable grief life thrusts upon all of us, including the grief of watching nature get destroyed by her own species. And then there's the dog. Her wonderful wonderful dog.

She passes through all the stages every aware person passes through, some staying in one stage, comfortably or not, while others stay stuck in despair, hopelessness...alcohol and drugs always optional. ...more

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Kindle Edition, 375 pages

Published June 1st 2014 by Ecological Outreach Services (first published May 1st 2013)

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Lists with This Book

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Women Environmental/Ecological Writers, Fiction, Non-fiction & Poetry/Prose

178 books — 29 voters

Eco-Fiction

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· 41 ratings · 17 reviews

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Aug 26, 2017 Ginger Bensman rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, ecology, feminist

Birdbrain is a book with important messages about the joys, costs, and heartbreak of finding and owning one’s own true self, and of discovering the mystical, unspeakable wonder of Earth and our human-imperiled biosphere (the well-spring of all life, and our one and only home).
Ellie, the book’s protagonist, experiences a dawning awareness that her life as a taken-for-granted appendage of her husband is virtually empty and she begins to long for more—to want a life that has joy and purpose. Just ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 David Rose rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: more-please-author

Rare and wonderful

Wonderful, profound, earthy, moving, empathic, refreshing, inspiring - ok, maybe I should stop with the superlatives, but not before I add, above all, real. There is not a character in these pages, major or minor, that did not ring true. Ellie would laugh at me, but I think this book is important because it may reach people who wouldn't otherwise read "eco-crap". Then again, Ellie might sympathise with my naive enthusiasm. Some books are as rare as the not-so-mythical snipe, a ...more

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Jul 15, 2013 Sarah (SB) ღ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

50% The west had done been settled and wandering now meant running into a fence, a sign, or a gun. Michigan still had it's open spaces, like the Upper Peninsula, and some ares close to Canada but these were calculated spots. Ellie thought as she was driving down Highway 15 in San Diego County, where the development was hot and heavy, how it was getting to the point in America where you have to calculate how to get to certain locations so feelings of freedom can be evoked. But it calculated freed ...more

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Jun 02, 2014 Melanie Page rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Birdbrain is a self-published (2014) novel by Virginia Arthur. Clocking in at 500 pages, Birdbrain covers a lot of ground. The novel starts in Michigan in 1982 with 26-year-old Ellie sitting at home, waiting for her husband to love her more than the TV. When she accidentally goes on the wrong day to her church picnic, she discovers a group who loves bird watching, which becomes the catalyst for her divorce. Although she meets new men along the way, including one who loves and waits for her, Elli ...more

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Nov 23, 2013 Lita Burke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Birdbrain by Virginia Arthur is a contemporary novel about a young woman’s life as a passionate environmentalist. I purchased a copy of this book.

Birdbrain covers the life of a 1970’s young woman named Ellie and her laughter, losses, and struggles to save the wilderness she loves. Disaster and delight swirl around her. It starts when she mistakes the date for an outdoor picnic, discovers birding, and gets the courage to divorce her emotionally dead husband.

The chapter about Ellie’s struggle to s ...more

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Jul 11, 2014 Emily Crow rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: bird-title-project, birds-birds, read-in-2015, environmental-fiction, michigan-setting

On the whole, I did enjoy Birdbrain quite a bit. It is the story of a lonely housewife who leaves her husband in the early 1980s and falls in love with birding and nature. Along the way she gets an education, travels the country, and tries to defend the last open spaces being quickly gobbled up by rampant development. I loved the birding, enjoyed the author's descriptions of natural landscapes, and wanted to cheer Ellie on as she tried to save the coastal sage habitat in California. There are al ...more

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Sep 07, 2018 Michael Guest rated it it was amazing

A subtle spiritual message underpins this book’s complex of themes and more overt calls to environmental awareness and action — to “make a difference in the world.” The theme is along the lines of, We take one walk through this existence. Don’t miss a second, make the most of it: a moral that keeps returning as a kind of tacit mantra.

Semi-autobiographical protagonist Ellowyn (Ellie) expresses it most directly in a realization about the stunning, multifaceted, but generally undervalued, spectacl ...more

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Jun 22, 2019 Elliot Jackman rated it really liked it

Virginia Authur tells us a story about a young woman, Ellie, that was been lulled into complacency in her life until she has an epiphany while accidentally getting involved with a bird watching group.

She knows she's unhappy and bored with her marriage but doesn't really have a plan on what to do about it. Once she decides that she can't stay in the relationship any longer, she begins a long and hard process of what could be considered a type of spiritual growth. Not spiritual in the religious se Virginia Authur tells us a story about a young woman, Ellie, that was been lulled into complacency in her life until she has an epiphany while accidentally getting involved with a bird watching group.

She knows she's unhappy and bored with her marriage but doesn't really have a plan on what to do about it. Once she decides that she can't stay in the relationship any longer, she begins a long and hard process of what could be considered a type of spiritual growth. Not spiritual in the religious sense, but more emotional and intellectual.

She can't really afford to just go find a new place to live, so she bounces around between her best friend, her mother's house and her sister in San Diego, CA.

During this time, she also realizes that she needs to do something to improve her life. With some pushing from her mother, she completes her degree in biology. She can now realize her dream of making "bird watching" a career.

This natural progression also causes Ellie to realize that what the average person calls progress, is really mass destruction, murder and genocide of many species of animals and plants. This sets her on a path that all her friends, family and acquaintances label as "environmental activism."

Involving herself in many battles, most of which are lost, she eventually finds her niche in life and can channel her feelings in a way that makes her abilities and knowledge more productive.

The story itself was compelling enough that I wanted keep reading. It wasn't because there was necessarily always some drama that was unfolding for which I needed to see what was going to happen, but more because Ellie's transformation seemed to be a very real and plausible progression for someone to follow. It outlines the types of outside and inside influences that can completely transform the way someone views the world and society.

Overall, the book is well written. There is some dialogue in the first portion of the book that, I must admit, I reread twice and still didn't understand what the people were talking about. This didn't turn out to affect my enjoyment of the book.

I enjoyed watching Ellie's transformation, without having the author "talk down" to me about any particular environmental crusade. The story made the point solely by showing Ellie's intellectual progression and the way her thinking changed based on the behavior of people around her, along with her changing relationships with her friends, family and lovers.

I have to go now, as I suddenly feel the need to grab my binoculars and go watch some birds! ...more

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May 20, 2018 Samantha Henthorn rated it it was amazing

Wow! A mouthful, I really enjoyed reading this. If you enjoyed Thelma and Louise and/or Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem Trees Please (available on a variety of poetry websites) then this book will appeal to you. This may seem like a never the (literary) twain shall meet, but the book starts with the protagonist Ellowyn (Ellie to her friends) starting a journey of self discovery- out and about with her friend Patty. Ellie suffers life’s ups and downs, without spoiling, the ups are the message of this s ...more

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Apr 15, 2020 Haris rated it really liked it

I really enjoyed this. I loved the character of Ellowyn and was on board for her journey. I loved the humor and felt her predicament. Her dissatisfaction with her life and her marriage. John Prine recently passed and I'm a huge fan. His song, "Angel From Montgomery", explored some these same issues and Birdbrain resonated with me the same way. I know nothing about birding, but I found the details fascinating and I found it totally believable that Ellowyn would use birding as a way to reconnect w ...more

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May 18, 2019 Joe Ward rated it really liked it

The book itself, as a physical object, is poorly constructed and replete with typos (some of which have been corrected by hand!). The story is told in the vernacular, which I find refreshing. There is sex and there is violence. The violence is towards the Earth and this violence breaks the protagonist's, Ellie's, heart. Ellie's love for birds, and for nature, sets her apart from those around her who don't understand. It certainly is sad to stand witness to a biosphere in decline. I don't ordinar ...more

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Feb 14, 2018 Mary Nee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A good book . I enjoyed it !

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Mar 11, 2014 Allan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Okay, I admit it: I am a nature nut. An enviro. A person who gets pissed off when yet another house gets built in some suburb. I mourn the loss of habitat to the extent of being nearly pathological. I love Ed Abbey. I'm with him when he said "the ideology of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell".

And so it isn't often I read a novel that understands such themes. Virginia Arthur takes her time with the book. She sets up the characters and let's them be what they are. She doesn't shy away fro Okay, I admit it: I am a nature nut. An enviro. A person who gets pissed off when yet another house gets built in some suburb. I mourn the loss of habitat to the extent of being nearly pathological. I love Ed Abbey. I'm with him when he said "the ideology of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell".

And so it isn't often I read a novel that understands such themes. Virginia Arthur takes her time with the book. She sets up the characters and let's them be what they are. She doesn't shy away from themes of class. And I think the cover of the book, with the beautiful Ellie, looking into the future with a couple of bulldozers around her and a binoculars at her feet, well, that cover is perfect.

In this case, you can judge a book by its cover.

Some might say the thing is a bit long and wordy. That the author could cut something here or there. No. Our lives are long and fun and tragic and good and bad and sometimes tedious and sometimes disastrous and sometimes magical. This book understand that and so it takes its time as Ellie leaves her husband for the love of birds.

And I come away from the book, borrowing a line from it often: to be an environmentalist is to live constantly with a broken heart. Oh so true.

I'm told that this work took 13 years to write and is loosely based on the author's own experiences. It takes a whole lot of effort to create such a story that includes themes of environmental loss, yet inspires hope that maybe, just maybe, others will get the bug of watching birds, or whales or trees---and figure out that they are worth saving.

Books that inspire you to become active outdoors are few and far between. Most nature books are written with adrenaline in mind. They are about climbing Everest or doing the seven highest peaks or climbing the highest tree. Or climbing a rock. Having an adrenaline experience is what the outdoors has become to a generation that comes after generation X. The slopes of a mountain have given way to the artificialness, and adrenaline, of a snowboarders half tube. This book isn't about adrenaline. It is about enjoyment. Solitude. Love.

We need more novels like this. We need to encourage writers who write books like this. A wilderness experience has become so rare that it rarely becomes a setting or subject of a novel these days (except to spur adrenaline). Virginia inspires something else; she inspires action. Beauty. Reflection. Listening. Watching. Being observant. In a world where the Pacific Crest Trail is only mentioned in regards to speed records, Birdbrain presents something better: take a look around and enjoy what you got because it ain't gonna last long unless you get off your butt and take care of it.

Buy this book. 0 ...more

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Sep 22, 2015 Juliet Wilson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, nature

Ellie falls into birdwatching by accident when she gets the date of a church picnic wrong and finds herself surrounded by birdwatchers. Seeing the care and attention that a pair of bluebirds pay to each other, she finally relaises she needs to work up the courage to finally leave her no-good husband. So she packs her belongings into her truck and takes her dog off to her best friend Patty's place.

The two of them become more and more interested in birds and sign up as volunteers at a local nature Ellie falls into birdwatching by accident when she gets the date of a church picnic wrong and finds herself surrounded by birdwatchers. Seeing the care and attention that a pair of bluebirds pay to each other, she finally relaises she needs to work up the courage to finally leave her no-good husband. So she packs her belongings into her truck and takes her dog off to her best friend Patty's place.

The two of them become more and more interested in birds and sign up as volunteers at a local nature reserve, Ellie with considerably more enthusiasm than Patty. As Ellie returns to college to study biology and realises that life doesn't need to be the consumerist normality sold us by the media while Patty follows her new carrer in the business world, the two friends grow apart.

This is an entertaining story about friendship, very perceptive about human relationships and our relationship with nature both on the personal level:

"Her new habit of self interrupting whatever she was doing 'just to look at a bird' was in the eyes of her friends and family..... an endearing if not odd affectation. This irritated her, the idea that anyone who notices anything outside the selfish human world is immediately considered a bit odd. "

and also in detailing the unscrupulous destruction of biodiverse, ecologically valuable wild land to build strip malls, including a heartbreakingly detailed description of Ellie's involvement in trying to save an area of Californian wild land slated for development.

I really enjoyed the portrayal of Ellie's growing awareness of nature, with all the descriptions of the birds she sees, the knowledge she gains about them and her growing impatience and dislike of the way the human world encroaches on nature. These descriptions feel totally integral to the story, rather than added on as afterthoughts and erven where Ellie's feelings about over-development verge on becoming rants, they're Ellie's rants rather than the author's and so are convincing.

This book reminded me to some extent of Barabara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour (which I review here), but though not as well written as that (and in places needing a finer editing), it is ultimately a more engaging and more passionately felt story.

It's a moving and thoughtful story of family, friendship and our failed relationship with the natural world that surrounds us.

...more

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Aug 11, 2015 Robert Zwilling rated it it was amazing

What I liked about this story was that the journey was the destination, which continually evolved. The beginning is always slow but once launched the story soared like an eagle, allowing the reader a beautiful view of the surrounding world, our world. And the idea that change was still in the works, still happening. One person at a time.

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Mar 30, 2015 Cassy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I received this book as a Goodreads winner. Really liked this book. Enjoyed the environmental theme and the relationships the main character goes through especially the one with her oldest friend.

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Apr 03, 2015 Virginia Arthur rated it it was amazing · (Review from the author)

I wrote it so what the hell, it's terrific! ...more

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About Virginia Arthur

Virginia Arthur

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Just bloomed!

Stem and Leaf Plots. Ten Eco-fiction Short Stories (Includes Winter Girl).

Enjoy (and review!).

https://books2read.com/u/3n880K

Thank you and be well, stay sane.

**********

Thank you for reading my work and leaving reviews.

La De Da

I am a professional field biologist of many years. I have worked all over the U.S. (including some fantastic field years in Alaska) and in some parts of Europe. ...more