This is a book about a mother/daughter relationship, told from the perspective of the daughter. The mother, a Korean prostitute, basically rejects her half-black daughter as the girl is growing up. A string of the mother's dead birds (all killed by the daughter) serve as first a wall and then a bridge between them.

My favorite part of this book is how you only know what the daughter knows, so the whole story isn't packaged up and handed to you. Tidy happy endings that leave no questions are boring, and this book will not bore you. ( )

A beautiful book about terrible things. I can't remember the last time I read such difficult subject matter. ( )

Beautiful mother/daughter past-still-haunts-first novel. Having never visited The Salton Sea, this novel feels like the perfect introduction ( )

Winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction, this novel tells the search-for-identity story of a black Korean American daughter of a former prostitute who worked near a GI base in the mid 1960s postwar Korea. The structure juxtaposes present-day and present-tense narrative by the daughter against third-person accounts of the mother’s hardship story. The daughter of famed Jeju-do divers, Hye-yang follows a close girlfriend to leave the harsh working life of her island fishing community and ends up first in a folk village, then in the lurid prostitution district. Along the way, she encounters two sexual experiences (minor in contemporary standards, but devastating to her virginal world) that were virtually rapes. She escapes to America married to a GI who believes she is pure, but when her black daughter is born, is violently beaten and abandoned. Working in massage parlors until her daughter is older, she scrapes together a living making craft products from eggshells. Ava, her daughter, doesn’t seem to know how to live in her own skin. She is clumsy and lost. Several accidents over the years claim the lives of birds kept by the mother, who documents their deaths in a book. The two live parallel in their hurts and needs, but the one place they can connect is when the mother breaks out in pansori, story-song, to bemoan her past, while Ava drums to the story’s emotional melody. The bird theme is in heavy use throughout, including Ava’s sojourn to the Salton Sea where thousands of birds have perished from botulism. Recurring themes of death, freedom, capture, release, dependence and connection are exemplified with the birds’ presence in the book.
Inclusion of the bird-death notebook entry, poems, excerpts from Audubon writings, use of different typefaces and the mother-daughter divide theme hearken to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal work, Dictee. The structure and plot of buried, pain-filled secrets also recall Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman. The story falters with a floundering protagonist, exceptionally (and unlikely) kind friends found in a retro restaurant, and the addition of a murder mystery that feels overwrought. And though the dialogue is sometimes stiff, Brandeis’ prose, especially when describing Ava’s senses and her feelings, is elegant, lyrically detailed, elegiac, evocative and a thing of beauty. ( )

This overlooked first novel is very good, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Gayle Brandeis won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, and the back jacket carries an endorsement from Toni Morrison. Not at all bad for your first time out.

The book moves back and forth between the story of a young Korean woman forced into prostitution on an American base, and her daughter by an unknown black serviceman. The title of the novel refers to the mother’s scrapbook memorializing the countless pet birds that her daughter has inadvertently slaughtered over the years. It's never 100% clear, actually, how accidental all the killings are. The daughter, Ava Sing Lo, is extraordinarily loyal to her mother, to the point of having internalized her mother's embarrassment and distance and turned them against herself, and so the unspoken possibility exists that the killings are unconscious acts of vengeance. The story, then, involves Ava's reclaiming of herself while simultaneously establishing common ground with her mother, on mutually supportive terms, for the first time in her life. The book also offers a terrific portrait of the communities surrounding southern California's Salton Sea, which is where Ava ransoms herself in the midst of a massive die-off of shorebirds.

The language is wonderful, and the main characters are well drawn. There were a few points where the social message of the book threatened to hijack and eclipse the story, and there is one sub-plot involving a series of murders that is never adequately explained or resolved, but these are really minor criticisms, and I’d highly recommend the book. I’m especially interested in reading the author's future efforts. Her next novel is due out in early 2007, I believe. She has a website and her own blog. If she can win the marketing game and get the attention she deserves, I think she may be at the beginning of a very promising career. ( )