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Bird (Sophie Cunningham, Text, $32.95 tpb, ISBN 978192351525, June) ***

Anna Davidoff, aka Bird, is a Russian immigrant, ’50s movie star and Buddhist nun. Ana-Sofia is her daughter, a lonely woman who cannot move forward with life until she comes to terms with her mother’s abandonment. Ana-Sofia confronts the people who knew her mother best: her best friend, her lover, and her spiritual guide. All of them have different stories to tell about the mysterious Anna. There was Anna the lover, Anna the selfish mother and Anna the drug addict. Bird is an ambitious story about identity, acceptance and the pursuit of happiness, issues that I suspect are close to the author’s heart. Cunningham’s adventurous use of voice highlights the story of a woman who everybody knew and no-one knew at all. But the end result is a shaky pastiche, as opposed to a fully realised character, and a story that, for my money, felt flimsy and underwritten. I wanted this story to go deeper, and it does, for one brief, beautiful chapter right at the end. Written in the voice of Anna herself, it tells of her childhood in Communist Russia and the guilt that drives her. If only there could’ve been more like this. Nonetheless Bird will be enjoyed by fans of Cunningham’s earlier novel Geography and can be  recommended to fans of Charlotte Wood and M J Hyland.

Esther van Doornum works at Readings in Carlton

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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