Birdie

By: Tracey Lindberg

Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan

Bernice Meetoos will not be broken. A big, beautiful Cree woman with a dark secret in her past, Bernice ("Birdie") has left her home in northern Alberta to travel to Gibsons, BC. She is on something of a vision quest, looking for family, for home, for understanding. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns - Jesse from The Beachcombers - because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man.

Birdie heads for Molly's Reach to find answers, but they are not the ones she expected. With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Birdie begins to draw from her dreams the lessons she was never fully taught in life.

Informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions, Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from tragedy. At heart, it is the story of an extraordinary woman who travels to the deepest part of herself to find the strength to face the past and to build a new life.

©2015 Tracey Lindberg (P)2017 Recorded Books

Remarkable generational story told with unabashed honesty

This book covers at least 2 generations of women broken by poverty incest rape prejudice and other daily realities of displaced peoples. If these experiences are foreign to you- read it you need to hear this voice. If these experiences are part of a history you share - read this book you need the language discovered here to unravel your own family mystery.

I appreciated the weaving of contemporary experience with flashbacks of childhood and the disembodiment that so often accompanies ongoing trauma.

This is a brutal beast of a tale told quickly carefully and lovingly while we helplessly hope for the redemption of “Birdie” being formed out of the mess and the muck she was born to sift through.

deep feeling

needed a therapist to help me through it but it was worth all those crazy feels.