Birding by Rose Ruane #Birding @RegretteRuane @CorsairBooks #BookReview

 

In a small seaside town, autumn is edging into winter, gulls ride winds over the waves, and two women pass each other on the promenade, as yet unaware of each other's existence.

In the nineties Lydia was a teen pop star, posed half naked on billboards everywhere with a lollipop between her lips and no idea how to live, letting the world happen to her. Now, three decades later, Lydia is less and less sure that what happened to her was in the least bit okay. The news cycle runs hot with #MeToo stories, and a famous former lover has emerged with a self-serving apology, asking her to forgive him. Suddenly, the past is full of trapdoors she is desperately trying not to fall through.

Joyce, in middle age, has never left home. She still lives with her mother Betty. With their matching dresses, identical hairdos and makeup, they are the local oddballs. Theirs is a life of unerring routine: the shops, biscuits served on bone china plates, dressing up for a gin and tonic on Saturday. Nice things. One misstep from Joyce can ruin Betty's day; so Joyce treads carefully. She has never let herself think about a different kind of life. But recently, along with the hot flushes, something like anger is asserting itself, like a caged thing realising it should probably try and escape.

Amid the grey skies, amusement parks and beauty parlours of a gentrifying run-down seaside resort, these two women might never meet. But as they both try to untangle the damaging details of their past in the hope of a better future, their lives are set on an unlikely collision course.

With mordant wit and lyrical prose, Birding asks if we can ever see ourselves clearly or if we are always the unreliable narrators of our own experiences. It is a story about the difference between responsibility and obligation, unhealthy relationships and abusive ones, third acts and last chances, and two women trying to take flight on clipped wings.

Birding by Rose Ruane is published by Corsair in Hardback, ebook and audio on 2 May 2024. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review. 

I read Birding in a couple of sitting whilst on holiday in Maderia last month. It's a beautiful, richly created story that raises so many questions. I especially like that, as the blurb says, it can make us look at ourselves and ask if we clearly see ourselves, or are we the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

Rose Ruane brilliantly describes the small seaside town in the autumn months. I'm from Lincolnshire and have spent time in towns exactly like this. Places that are garish and flashy and full of colour in the summer and that seem to shrink as the winter approaches. Becoming greyer and colder, dull and uninviting. Ruane has captured this town so well. 

Lydia and Joyce both live here. They have never met, except for one moment when they pass on the promenade, and it is that short moment that is the focus of the story.

But first we get to meet Lydia and Joyce independently. Two characters that are so perfectly created, total opposites ... or are they?  Lydia spent her early years in the limelight, a teen pop star whose image was everywhere.  Joyce has never left home, has never had a job and is now in her middle years. She and her mother live together, shop together, go to the club together. They dress alike, they drink alike but Lydia is beginning to feel angry. As she contemplates her future and deals with the menopausal symptoms, she's thinking about escaping. 

This is a dark story that deals expertly with some very emotional issues, yet it has instances of wonderfully dry humour that brings a light relief, a smile and a nod of the head. Ruane has explored the relationships within her story with compassion and understanding, she makes her reader question the rights and wrongs in the world, allows us to be angry and to be sad and also to cheer for our main characters. 

Birding is a powerful, lyrical story filled with complex and intricate characters in a setting that could be everywhere and anywhere. Recommended by me 

Rose was originally a visual artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and video.
Stories and language were always part of her art practice, but as the written word crept further and further into her art and gradually edged out making and performing, she had to admit that she had become a writer instead.

She undertook the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, and subsequently won the Off West End Adopt a Playwright award in 2015. She writes plays, makes podcasts, performs spoken word and occasionally still has a go at drawing and making things just to see if she still can.

She lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs.

X @RegretteRuane