“Fragmented thoughts stack on top of each other jumped through my head at that moment: home, my mother, the accident, real life. I swallowed hard. Please don’t take this away from me yet.”
Karen Green’s Yellow Birds follows the summer of self-named Kait, a recent high school graduate who leaves her home in Toronto to follow the Yellow Birds — the fans of a band called Open Road who flock and follow their tour on the cusp of the digital revolution. Green’s debut novel balances entrancing and layered storytelling with warm, sweet prose, offering consolation, hope, and a glowing reflection on coming of age and finding love and community.
Without a plan or purpose, Kait leaves home with a few schoolmates to see a few Open Road shows, but she seamlessly adapts to the Yellow Birds’ communal lifestyle and joins a quirky group of friends living out of an old van. Kait follows the band across America and develops close friendships with a few van-mates, enveloped by the unorthodox comforts of tour life. When she meets Horizon at a party, a man her age who travels in solitude in his homey van, she is immediately smitten. After their first night together, Kait packs up her few belongings and joins Horizon for the rest of the tour.
Their romance swiftly takes off, but they soon realize their relationship cannot deepen without their past experiences and deep-rooted beliefs surfacing to test their trust in each other. Horizon’s old flame will reappear and his struggle with addiction will threaten to undo their cohesion, and Kait will cross paths with a quasi-religious cult and its salacious leader who offer her shelter, but at a cost that may jeopardize her newfound relationships with others and herself. By summer’s end, Kait must choose where to forge a home and with who truly feels like family.
With eased poeticism, Green uses her knowledge and love of music to create a widely loved and unifying band whose music and lyricism work to tether Kait to her new friends, Horizon, and their shared counter-culture summer. Descriptions of daily life on this tour are dreamy and immersive:
“[E]ven with the haphazard remains of last night’s party strewn about, morning in the Field was quiet and peaceful […] We walked past a guy strumming a guitar and singing quietly. It was beautiful; soft and gentle and welcoming, like a lullaby, but a song for waking up instead of falling asleep, and I wondered why we didn’t have more of those.”
Most notably, Green’s way of conveying the many moving parts of young adulthood — the loneliness, the yearning, the fear and overwhelm of the unknown — with a tone of knowing nostalgia anchors us to Kait’s world. We may be reading about a summer long gone, but her first-person narration fortifies the events of the past with the kind of wisdom one can only gain with time and experience. The prologue tells the true story of 300 reindeer that were collectively struck by a lightning bolt as they grouped together for warmth in the late summer of 2016 in Denmark. It is a fate scientists said could have been avoided if they had scattered when the storm came,
“But that, they agreed, is not the usual behavior for most animals. The usual behavior is to huddle together, to look for warmth and protection in each other.”
This opening anecdote sets the tone of recollection and the stage for Kait’s story, where recurring animal imagery underscores her winding journey to accept the challenges and rewards of living in a flock rather than in solitude. Expertly paced, Yellow Birds combines scandalous scenes brimming with tension and intrigue with the ordinary but beautifully portrayed moments on the road. Green’s tender depiction of becoming an adult will comfort you like an old favourite song you have not heard in years, resonating more clearly now with time and retrospection.
Karen Green is a successfully published writer who has had her poetry, essays, and fiction featured in Room Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Globe and Mail, and more. She has also contributed to Juno-winning and platinum-selling albums during her tenure as a senior copywriter. She is the author of two young reader books (Fisher Price).
Publisher: re:books (March 5, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 170 pages
ISBN: 9781998206148
Hannah Briggs (she/her) is a writer and reader settled on Treaty 6 land in London, Ontario. Themes of social justice and equity, mental wellness, and queer identities and relationships motivate her most deeply. She enjoys reading by the water, people-watching at the market, and being a "guncle" to her roommates’ mischievous cats.