book review: All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
The backstory: All the Birds, Singing , the second novel by Australian author Evie Wyld, was longlisted for the 2014 Baileys Prize . The basics: Jake lives on a sheep farm in England, where she mostly sticks to herself and with her dog, Dog. She's clearly running from her past, which adds a bit of mystery, and the action shifts between flashbacks to the past and the present. My thoughts: All the Birds, Singing is a book I wanted to like more than I liked. Perhaps I read it at the wrong time, but I struggled to get through this slim volume. If experimental nature fiction is a genre, then this novel is it. On the whole, I felt this novel was disjointed. Most obviously, the narrative is intentionally disjointed, as the action shifts (often awkwardly for this reader) between time periods, but without clear markers. From the first pages, there's an assumption the narrator won't tell this story from the beginning and expects the reader to make sense of the characters and e...