Silhouette of a Sparrow

August 6, 2012
With a father haunted by his WWI service and a mother consumed with social standing, 16-year-old Garnet is eager to spend time with relatives in the resort town of Excelsior, Minn., during the summer of 1926. She soon settles into life with her snooty aunt and frosty 14-year-old cousin. Garnet is a bird lover who uses scissors to create silhouettes of the birds she sees (a “quaint Victorian pastime,” as she puts it), but this interest masks her deeper passion for the study and protection of birds. Garnet accepts that her future is marriage, not college, at least until she meets Isabella, a dancer who shows Garnet how to follow her dreams and opens her eyes to unexpected romance. Garnet’s sexual awakening is suffused with lightness and joy, and her familial and identity struggles will resonate with contemporary teens, although the ending is perhaps too neat. Picture book author Griffin’s (Loon Baby) first novel for teens is laced with evocative period details that give readers a taste of what it was like to come of age during the flapper era. Ages 12–up.

August 1, 2012
A sweet, quiet coming-of-age story set in a Prohibition-era lakeside resort. Middle-class Garnet, 16, has been sent from St. Paul to spend the summer with a distant, wealthy relative to give her shellshocked World War I-veteran father space to heal. She misses him terribly; before the war they went birding together, and he protected her from her mother's attempts to make her a lady. She has sublimated her love of the outdoors into an uncanny talent to cut the silhouettes of birds, which decorate and inform each chapter. Once in Excelsior, she finds herself bored by ladylike pursuits and both seeks employment with the milliner and falls in love with Isabella, a beautiful girl who performs in the forbidden dance hall. Race relations, class differences and "the love that dare not speak its name" intertwine thoughtfully in this meticulous novel. The Jazz Age resort-town setting and environs are beautifully evoked; the author's afterword attests to her research. Garnet's narration reveals a girl on the cusp of modernity, one whose desire for something more and something else feels both alluring and terrifying. A subplot in which Garnet attempts to convince her employer not to use feathers in her hats is consistent but feels superfluous in this otherwise tight and purposeful, if slightly overdetermined, novel. This slim tale is a positive breath of fresh air in a market bloated with opportunistic dystopian and paranormal romances. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)

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September 15, 2012
Grades 7-12 Because of her father's emotional illness, 16-year-old Garnet is sent to spend the summer of 1926 with wealthy relatives at a resort hotel in Excelsior, Minnesota. There, despite her relatives' snobbish disapproval, she takes a job in a milliner's shop where she meets the beautiful Isabella, a flapper and dancer at the local dance hall. The two girls quickly (too quickly?) fall in love and begin a secret relationship. In addition to her love for Isabella, Garnet's other great passion is birds; she longs to go to college to study science and perhaps become a field biologist. Her mother has other, more traditional plans for her future, however. Which path will Garnet pick, and what will happen to her relationship with Isabella? Griffin does a nice job with her period setting, and although Garnet's relatives are stock types, Isabella is a fully realized character, and the girls' relationship is tenderly and touchingly realized. There are some contrivances (a fire may be too convenient), but otherwise the book is a pleasant and diverting read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2013
Summering with her snooty relatives in 1926 Excelsior, Minnesota, sixteen-year-old aspiring ornithologist Garnet falls in love with dazzling flapper Isabella. The narrative voice is oddly prescriptive and analytical (her cousin's confession of debt leaves Garnet reflecting "now there was an interesting complexity to her character"), but the uniqueness of the story's setting and plot offset the clunkiness of its telling.

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)