★ ★ ★ ★
The Boy With a Bird In His Chest is an achingly beautiful modern fantasy tale full of creative allegory, vibrant imagery, and young love.
I wasn’t ready for this book. I’d read the reviews, most of which gushed over how emotionally impactful the story was for them. But I’m a jaded adult who couldn’t possibly be swayed by a young adult tale, right? Yet Lund’s character-driven tale got me in the feels right from the start. And it still haunts me now, hours after I finished it. I say character-driven because this is a character study shared in brief vignettes, some subtle as a whisper, inspiring as the green flash at sunset, or mysterious as the whisper of wind through a copse of trees. Readers looking for long chapters and clear plot threads should adjust their expectations accordingly.
Lund captured the environments of her vignettes with tantalizing minimalism, evoking breathtaking scenery using careful phrasing and watercolor imagery. Lund similarly captured the kaleidoscopic inner thoughts of Owen, the teenage main character, as he navigates the already tumultuous waters of being a queer teenager from a broken home who also happens to have a small bird named Gail living in a hole in his chest. Gail is at once allegory, turning Owen into the Terror he feels growing up gay in small-town America, and chorus, echoing Owen’s thoughts and giving voice to his budding intuition and sense that the world is somehow wrong.
Despite knowing most of this already going in, I didn’t expect the quiet masterpiece that I found on these pages.
The story contains mild descriptions of violence, teenage drug use, masturbation, and teenage sex.