A Bird Alone by Ericka Clay

A Bird Alone by Ericka Clay
Series: A Standalone
Publisher: Believable Books (January 8, 2024)

REVIEW BY PRISCILLA BETTIS

A Bird Alone tells the story of Marge, a widow, and her young daughter, Whitney. They live in Arkansas during the 1980s, and they bump heads. Over the 23-year span of the story, their lives are tangled up with those around them until it seems the whole community is in a big knotted mess. Even so, God’s grace makes its way into their lives in amazing, impactful ways.

This is not a happy-go-lucky read. Poverty, racism, bullying, drug addiction, single-parenting a special needs child, an eating disorder/depression, rape, teen pregnancy, and classism saturate the story. In consideration of sensitive readers, Clay handles these difficult topics in delicate ways, keeping any graphic images or brutal language off page yet allowing the reader to understand what happens.

It is in the midst of the most terrible circumstances that the characters encounter God. Clay manages to make a grim story be full of hope and love and fellowship and faith. A Bird Alone warmed my heart.

Clay is a poet, too, so her prose is infused with lyricism and metaphors that forge solid characters. For example, Marge is obese and miserable. But motherly love makes her determined. When the doctor asks Marge if she wants to institutionalize her autistic son, she says, “I cant.”:

It was a simple answer, two words that she normally buried underneath a wet pile of organs. She had thought them all her life… But this version was different. She had plucked them from somewhere underneath her appendix and offered them to the doctor with a side of resolve.

-Ericka Clay, A Bird Alone

Another time, Marge receives some painful news:

Marge chuckled to herself because crying was an island she had forgotten how to swim to.

-Ericka Clay, A Bird Alone

Marge ended up being my favorite character. Life has been cruel to her, and I felt so sorry for her. But the other characters are fantastic too. There are Whitney, Marge’s aforementioned daughter who is head-strong; Jamal, Whitney’s boyfriend with a HUGE secret; Garrett, Marge’s autistic son; Denise, an aggressive woman with a wounded heart; and more.

Clay’s novel was almost a perfect read for me. I stumbled a bit whenever a child refers to his or her parents by their first names. Also, in a dialogue passage when a character offers a silent reply (perhaps a gesture or a thought), I would have preferred a separate paragraph just to make it clear who is speaking and who is silent. But these are minor issues, and readers’ opinions will vary, so only half a fish off.

Overall, Clay’s novel is a soul-nourishing story. A Bird Alone is literary Christian fiction at its finest. Four-and-a-half fish!

I read A Bird Alone through Kindle Unlimited.