All the Little Bird-Hearts - Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (and a 2023 Booker Prize Update)

 

For good reason, Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow's All the Little Bird-Hearts was included on the 2023 Booker Prize longlist. The novel's main character, Sunday Forrester, is autistic and lives alone with her sixteen-year-old daughter Dolly, a teen who is starting to explore the outside world on her own - something her autistic mother has never been capable of doing easily. Sunday is the novel's narrator, and everything that happens is seen and recounted via her individual way of looking at the world. It all seems very real to the reader thanks in no small part to the fact that author Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow is herself autistic.

Sunday is surprised one day to find a woman confidently sunbathing in the garden next door because Tom, her neighbor, had not told her to expect anyone in his absence. Little did Sunday know that she was beginning "The Year of Vita," or that in a few months she would barely remember the life she was living before meeting Vita on that fateful day. Within days, Sunday and Vita became "best friends," and Sunday and Dolly were joining Vita and her husband for regular Friday night dinners. Dolly, sensing a certain kinship spirt with the new neighbor, succumbed to Vita's charms just as quickly as her mother had done.

And that was the problem. 

Lloyd-Barlow's characters are all flawed in unique and individual ways, some more likable than others, but all of them so vividly imagined that they seem as real to reader's as their own neighbors and friends. Some characters understand themselves, some don't; some are weak enablers of bad behavior on the part of others; and some are just doing the best they can to make it from one day to the next.

Sunday is one of the ones who knows exactly who she is:

"My mind is an electrical and involuntary force. Everything touches many, many other things, and these points of intersection are the only way in which the world can be properly understood.

I remain convinced there is a universal code to be broken, a pattern to be understood...What would it be to live without the laborious work of translation, to hear and instantly know what you have heard."

Too, Sunday's way of seeing the world results in an unforgettable description of the behavior she observes in Vita, behavior she sees as being very bird-like:

"I see that my frequent muteness was a convenience to someone who was soft-feathered and sharp-eyed. And who sang away to herself in my presence, happily and without interruption, for she knew I had no song with which to call back...Birds have traditionally been banned from Italian households, whether as pets, paintings, or ornaments. They are believed to bring the Evil Eye...I would not have knowingly allowed even the image of a bird into my home, however beautiful. But I lived for and loved a bird-heart that summer; I only knew it afterwards."

 All the Little Bird-Hearts is very much a psychological drama, one in which the pressure is turned up on Sunday - and on the reader - so gradually that imminent dangers are never anticipated until it is too late to do much about them. The construction of the novel's plot is as clever and fascinating as the deep dive into the mind of a character like Sunday Forrester. If you enjoy well written psychological drama, this is one you should not miss.

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow author photo

00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

I have now read eight of the thirteen Booker Prize nominees and decided not to finish two others. The remaining three have been on hold at the library for so long now that I'm beginning to wonder if they will ever turn up. One of them is still showing "on order," and that doesn't give me a lot of confidence that I'll ever see it. I personally rank the ten Booker books I've spent time with so far this way:

1. The House of Doors
2. The Bee Sting
3. If I Survive You
4. Western Lane
5. All the Little Bird-Hearts
6. Pearl
7. Old God's Time
8. This Other Eden
9. A Spell of Good Things
10. In Ascension

Still to go:

• Prophet Song (the eventual winner of the prize)
• Study for Obedience
• How to Build a Boat