The Economy of Sparrows by Trevor Herriot

Readers of quiet nature writing and socially aware literary fiction will enjoy this novel from Thistledown. The Economy of Sparrows is nature writer Trevor Herriot’s first novel. Nell Rowan researches the history of her family’s land which she has just inherited; she becomes enraptured by disturbances in migratory bird habits, local archives about a nineteenth-century bird collector, and the politics of initiating a monument to her family’s land. Among these issues in her prairie surroundings, the arrival of a foster child, fifteen-year-old Carmelita, brings Nell’s ecological concerns and family tragedies old and new to the forefront.

Herriot’s nature writing and technical interests are on display even in his fiction—each chapter’s epigraph is a different entry from Taverner’s Birds of Western Canada. Taverner and other real ornithologists and natural historians are frequent subjects of the novel, but all of the contemporary characters are fictional.

The Economy of Sparrows is a meditative reflection on prairie life, relationships, and changing and unchanging landscapes and politics. The book is populated with fables and mythology but is also a fable in and of itself. Carmelita is a precocious teen who can understand the animals that Nell loves, including her dog Lily, her horse Tess, and the wild animals that enter the boundaries of the farmstead. The themes of listening, questioning, empathy, and companionship are well-solidified but not too heavy-handed.

Nell had a soft spot for sparrows. She thought of them as the wallflowers of the songbird world, dressed in shades of brown and grey that let them hide. But from their cover in the grass or trees, they sang the songs that seemed completely right for the places she found them: aspen bluff, spruce woods, bog, marsh, prairie.

While focusing on a white community and their histories, Herriot does not sidestep the colonial history that Canadian agricultural culture was built on. Nell is aware of the settler history that she carries with her, and she considers how to balance honouring where her family lived with participating in the landback movement. None of the principal characters are Indigenous, however, and the only notable person of colour is Carmelita, who is a half-white, half-Mexican immigrant who was raised by a working-class single mother. While her identity is not used to educate Nell or the reader about marginalized histories, Carmelita’s mysterious connection to animals’ thoughts does remind me of the “Magical Minority” trope and seems oddly placed in an otherwise very grounded novel.

Herriot’s storytelling has some over-technical moments, but his nature writing shines strong in the moving descriptions of landscape and fauna. The characters and their relationships are compelling, though I finished reading the book having retained few details of Nell’s interiority. Nell’s complexities are more so driven by her circumstances—she must confront the mystery of her mother’s death when she meets Carmelita, who has also lost her mother, and she struggles to navigate honouring her family’s complicated history with a stolen land. As Nell situates herself in this network of personal, political, and ornithological economies, the deep histories of nature around her and within her reveal themselves in expertly written unfoldings.

Trevor Herriot is a prairie naturalist, activist, and writer living on the northern edge of the Great Plains in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thistledown Press (Sept. 12 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771872462
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771872461

Zoe Shaw

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Zoe Shaw is a writer, editor, and administrator based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She is managing editor at carte blanche literary magazine. Her major interests are in gender and sexuality, ecocriticism, and the elegy in British Romantic poetry, which she explored in her master’s thesis at McGill University. @zoestropes on Instagram. Her website is http://zoeshaw.com/