EDITORS' CHOICE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 CARNEGIE MEDAL
A Best Book of 2020 at Electric Literature, Refinery29 and Lit Hub
A Best Book of Summer at Vulture, Refinery29, Yahoo! Life, Alma, Subway Book Review, and Lit Hub
A Best Book of the Month at Entertainment Weekly, Hello Giggles, and PopSugar
Most Anticipated at The New York Times Book Review, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Belletrist
"What is Parakeet about? It’s about an ambivalent bride. It’s about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, bad mothers, womanhood, monogamy and the nature of time itself. It’s about being a woman trapped by her subconscious and social conventions."
—Bess Kalb, The New York Times Book Review
"Mournful, witty, and heartbreakingly honest."
—Seija Rankin and David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
“The fantastic infiltrates the story in overtly metaphoric ways . . . But Ms. Bertino establishes a rationale for the madness beyond matrimonial jitters . . . Like most trauma fiction, Parakeet becomes narrowly preoccupied by a single, all-defining moment that somehow both reconfigures the past and sets the course for the future . . . But unlike most books in the genre, the novel isn’t lugubrious, instead steering into the experience of absurdity with a recklessness that keeps you guessing.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"An utterly humane, beautiful, weird, and accepting book."
—Alexandra Kleeman, Lit Hub
"I’ve been a wee bit obsessed with this hypnotic, semi-surrealist jewel of a book ever since I tore through a galley in the first two days of the new year . . . Strange in all the most wondrous ways, Parakeet is a dazzling hybridic work of riotous humor and aching pathos, a cold feet fantasia of outlandish and extraordinary proportions, and, above all else, an exquisitely written mediation on buried trauma and grief. I’ll bet good money that this shimmering, dreamlike novel is unlike any you’ve read before."
—Dan Sheehan, Lit Hub
“In this brilliant romp . . . the voice is madcap, mythic, and exact—a tender, potent tragicomedy written with unapologetic panache . . . This is a book with a rare and brave hunger for feelings. Chaos and mystery are not something done to its people. The magic rises from who they are . . . [and] the spiral of a deep emotional intelligence asking earnest, unanswerable questions.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, Electric Literature
"Parakeet contains so much more than the typical wedding narrative: it’s a surrealist rendering of an ambivalent bride and the traumas she can’t outrun no matter the occasion . . . As more of the bride’s memories are unfurled and dissected, her forays into other dimensions become both rational and revelatory."
—Hillary Kelly, Vulture
“In embarking on Parakeet . . . one should never think they know what to expect . . . [T]he bride does not lead us down predictable paths. And perhaps this checking of expectations might make for good practice, depending on where you stand on the ceremony of weddings, and to a larger extent, the presumed behavior of women within marriage, relationships and society at large . . . sly, funny, heart wrenching, head-spinning and anything but expected.”
—Juliet Helmke, Observer
“Dazzling . . . a simultaneously hilarious and gutting exploration of trauma, loss and displacement . . . Parakeet asks how we reconstruct a personal geography after trauma, how we assemble those elusive fragments into a coherent self, situated in a coherent timeline, a coherent set of relationships . . . Witty, raw and masterfully chaotic, Bertino’s novel works for more than a moment—it’s revelatory all the way through.”
—Claire Fallon, Huffington Post
"A twisting, strange delight, Parakeet shimmers a soft and generous light on the darkest of a woman's innermost thoughts."
—Kristen Iversen, Refinery29
"Parakeet is a fever dream of a novel that you'll find yourself attempting to understand and longing to return to weeks after you've finished it . . . Believe it or not, anthropomorphic birds are not the strangest thing to happen in this book but, with each outlandish development, the story imparts lessons on aging, loss, acceptance, and love. Marie-Helene Bertino is a rare writer — one whose wit and eloquence is obviously innate but who will quietly knock you out with the alarming importance of what she has to say."
—Caroline McGregor, Buzzfeed News
“[Parakeet] could not be more perfect. It was everything that I wanted . . . bizarre, smart, heartbreaking, a funny, poignant story. The writing is almost ethereal.”
—BookRiot
“Untold surprises, phantasmagorical segues, and jarring shocks await . . . Parakeet is a virtuosic, perplexing, challenging trip.”
—Drew Hart, The Arts Fuse
“Bertino effectively weaves together complex timelines, dark humor, and sometimes too-strange coincidences into a tale of healing, intimacy, and womanhood.”
—Zoe Hwang, Washington Independent Review of Books
"A weird, ultimately uplifting journey, equal parts whimsy and wisdom . . .[Marie-Helene Bertino] makes readers vulnerable, more connected, laughing along the way . . . The magic in Bertino’s writing comes when her individually laudable sentences are pieced together like a mosaic . . . The effect is delightful, seamless, and unexpected.”
—Taylor Hickney, World Literature Today
"Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered from humdrum reality . . . Bertino playfully, precisely builds a big world in these pages, somehow making the case that there's too much love, pain, and magic to ever fit in one story, and fitting it in all the same."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Self-assured, strange, and winning . . . in the bright, prismatic, and fleeting language of the internet age—Bertino traces The Bride’s ping-pong journey in and out of the lives . . . [of] many memorable characters . . . The book’s linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino’s images demand a lot of the reader, but the relatability of The Bride’s honest and earnest attempts to do her best with the uncooperative life she has been given resonate on a deep, perhaps even universal, frequency. A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Marie-Helene Bertino's fiction is miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting. Parakeet is a strange book in the greatest sense: it sunders reality in sudden transformations and slippages, in the depth of its aches, in the beauty it insists upon in the face of violence, and in the powerful joy that Bertino dowses deep under the surface of even the bleakest moments of her characters' lives.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Florida
"[A] weird (in a good way!) and surrealist novel . . . Parakeet captures the frantic, fragmented life of the narrator. She is simply trying to do her best with the cards she has been dealt, and navigate her own tumultuous brain."
—Emily Burack, Alma
“Bertino impresses with this dreamlike, sardonic novel . . . Fans of Rivka Galchen will delight in [this] subtly fantastical tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Marie-Helene Bertino is an expert in breaking a heart so cleanly that it releases actual magic. Give up your idea of what a book is allowed to be, and she will show you the whole quivering universe.”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk
"Bertino skillfully weaves together reality and flights of fancy as she tackles a wide variety of issues women face and the different ways to navigate these issues. An amusing yet instructive work about how personal perspective can change everything; highly recommended."
—Joanna Burkhardt, Library Journal (starred review)
“Marie-Helene Bertino is one of my favorite writers working today, and her latest is one rare gem of a novel. In Bertino’s hands, anything seems possible, from a dead grandmother returning in the form of a bird to finding unexpected wonder in our strange and broken world, profound redemptions of the heart. Parakeet enchants and enthralls.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
★ 2020-03-15
One week before her wedding, The Bride is confronted in her Long Island hotel room by the spirit of her dead grandmother, embodied in the form of a parakeet, who begs her to reconnect with her estranged brother, a reclusive playwright who has made his career by staging the worst moment of The Bride’s own life.
The main character of this self-assured, strange, and winning book is a young woman in the final stages of preparing for her wedding to the groom, an elementary school principal whom she likes because he “doesn’t have to be drunk to dance.” However, as the wedding date approaches, The Bride’s psychological landscape becomes increasingly hazardous, and all her life’s certainties come under review. Following her grandmother’s avian visit, The Bride—who works as a biographer for people with traumatic brain injuries, helping them reconstruct their lives prior to their traumatizing events—travels back into the city to finalize her wedding plans, meet with her current client, pick up a new wedding dress (her original one has been liberally befouled by parakeet granny), and arrange a meeting with her brother, Tom, whose acclaimed play, Parakeet, is back on Broadway. The Bride lost contact with her brother over the course of the 10 years that have passed since their grandmother’s death and her own traumatizing event, a random act of violence that forms the central story of her brother’s play. When she finally does manage to hunt Tom down, she discovers that in those 10 years he has transitioned into Simone and must reenter her life, if she deigns to, as The Bride’s sister. From there—in the bright, prismatic, and fleeting language of the internet age—Bertino traces The Bride’s ping-pong journey in and out of the lives, and sometimes literally the bodies, of her frosty and judgmental mother; her professionally competent best friend; strangers who might be former lovers or alternate versions of herself; parakeet costumed performers who are being paid to reenact the Bride’s past, present, and potential future; and a Japanese lifestyle-blogging reptile in a suit and tie, to name a few of Bertino’s many memorable characters. The book’s linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino’s images demand a lot of the reader, but the relatability of The Bride’s honest and earnest attempts to do her best with the uncooperative life she has been given resonate on a deep, perhaps even universal, frequency.
A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope.
