The strange birds of Flannery O'Connor : a life

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Alznauer, Amy

Physical Description:

54 unnumbered pages : illustrations (chiefly colour), portraits ; 32 cm

Summary:

"When she was young, the writer Flannery O'Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She'd watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the Pathe News, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life."--Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Women authors, American -- 20th century -- Juvenile fiction.

Creative ability -- Juvenile fiction.

Birds -- Juvenile fiction

Human-animal relationships -- Juvenile fiction

Systemic lupus erythematosus -- Patients -- Juvenile fiction.

Additional Credits:

Zhu, Ping (Illustrator)

Audience/Lexile:

4.4

Publication Info:

New York : Enchanted Lion Books, [2020]

Subject:

Women authors, American -- 20th century -- Juvenile fiction.

Creative ability -- Juvenile fiction.

Birds -- Juvenile fiction

Human-animal relationships -- Juvenile fiction

Systemic lupus erythematosus -- Patients -- Juvenile fiction.

O'Connor, Flannery -- Juvenile fiction.

O'Connor, Flannery -- Childhood and youth -- Juvenile fiction.

O'Connor, Mary Flannery

O'Konnor, Flanneri

О'Коннор, Фланнери

American women authors

Creativeness

Creativity

Libman-Sacks disease

Lupus (Systemic lupus erythematosus)

Lupus erythematosus, Systemic

Lupus erythematosus disseminatus

SLE (Disease)

SAILS ISBN:

9781592702954

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Plainville Public Library	J 92 OCO	CHILDREN NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... West Bridgewater PL	J BIO O'CONNOR, FLANNERY	CHILDREN BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2020
Nominated for a 2021 Ezra Jack Keats Illustrator Award
Featured in 2021 Society of Illustrators Original Art Exhibition
A 2022 Book All Young Georgians Should Read
2020 Eureka! Nonfiction Children's Book Honor Award

I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs. -- Flannery O'Connor

When she was young, the writer Flannery O'Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She would watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the local news, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life. Written by Amy Alznauer with devotional attention to all things odd and illustrated in radiant paint by Ping Zhu, The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor explores the beginnings of one author's lifelong obsession.

Amy Alznauer lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks, and a part-time fish, but, as of today, no elephants or peacocks.
Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.

Reviews (4)

School Library Journal Review

Gr 2--5--This colorful book describes Flannery O'Connor's relatively short life (1925--1964) with large, sometimes abstract artwork. The illustrations take up the majority of each page and provide visual details to the text. The Southern Gothic author's life is traced from childhood to her death. Alznauer captures O'Connor's experiences on her farm, moving, losing her father, attending school, and returning back home to Georgia to live on the family farm. O'Connor's own writing appears throughout the pages. For a reader without much background knowledge on O'Connor, the flow of the narrative may seem detached and difficult to follow. An author's note includes photographs and illustrations from O'Connor's archives, as well as biographical notes and additional resources. VERDICT This title would best serve libraries that already have a variety of bibliographic titles for young readers and patrons who have curricular interests in the humanities.--Samantha Hull, Ephrata High School, PA

Publisher's Weekly Review

Alznauer treats writer Flannery O'Connor's life with exceptional delicacy and depth of feeling. Regularly chastised by her mother, the girl devotes herself to her chickens, gaining brief fame by training one to walk backward. "There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look," she discovers. As an adult, O'Connor is diagnosed with lupus, and her fame as a writer who "wanted to wake readers up like a rooster crowing" grows as her health deteriorates. At last, living at home with her mother, she fills her yard with peacocks, whose unearthly beauty--like "a thousand haloed suns"--intoxicates her. Using bold swaths of color, Zhu often shows O'Connor from far off, visualizing her isolation; the birds, by contrast, sit front and center, their plumage crisp and colorful. Alznauer understands her subject's instinctive attentiveness to the beauty of anything that doesn't fit in: "She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something so large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness." Ages 4--8. (June)

Kirkus Review

This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery O'Connor's childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness. With its memorable opening line, "Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens," the book celebrates her fascination with life's peculiarities--and death: "How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness," the text remarks about her grief at her father's passing. Deciding that she wants to write stories "as strange as death," she chooses staring as a writer's tool, plumbing the "hidden strangeness" of people and looking for "flashes of good" in complicated characters. After college and a brief stint writing in New York, she is diagnosed with lupus and returns home to Georgia. Alznauer includes some appropriately grim humor, as in young Flannery's fondness for a photo of a rooster that lived for a month without its head, and classroom humor as well: Flannery flings elastic from her braces at an impatient Sister Consolata. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhu's illustrations align with the book's focus on eccentricity, adding some imagined characters of color to the mostly white cast of historical figures. The thoughtful design--at 12 inches square, as outsized as its subject--includes a type chosen because its designer, like O'Connor, had a love for drawing birds. Backmatter fleshes out O'Connor's life and personality and includes a bibliography; it's not clear if the book's dialogue is directly quoted or invented. A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision. (Picture book/biography. 5-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

American author Flannery O'Connor knew a thing or two about strange birds because, in addition to being one herself, she had a lifelong adoration for these feathered friends. Aside from raising--and even training!--chickens as a child, O'Connor would feature them in her scribbly drawings and later in original stories. She soon became a skilled observer of the birds and people around her, recognizing that the more unique the subject, the more fascinating it became. Zhu makes excellent use of color and perspective in her artwork, which not only emphasizes O'Connor's personal beliefs and passions--wherein chickens loom large--but also the writer's changing place in the world around her. A double-page spread of a vibrant and varied world reflected in O'Connor's glasses is particularly arresting. Alznauer's research into the author's childhood lends quirky details to the biography, giving readers a strong sense of O'Connor's personality. Her lauded career and diagnosis of lupus as a young woman are matter-of-factly discussed and further elaborated on in the author's note. A celebratory account of a singular individual.