Ghost bird1/8/2024 ![]() This disturbing story quickly pulled me in and my anxiety about Karen Russell’s world which includes a stifling and deadly sky, constant surveillance, declining connections to reality, and the mysterious ghost birds that few can see soon became overwhelming. This connection has only deepened as the years have passed and as I have become increasingly concerned about the world that we are creating for our children. Perhaps because I grew-up on my family’s centuries-old-farm, I have always felt a strong connection to nature. Wow! This was my first Karen Russell story, but it definitely won’t be my last. How about you? Do you like Russell’s work? Did you like “The Ghost Birds”? Please let me know below! Those are some of the hallmarks of her work for me, but I have been trying to do better to recognize that what I like in fiction, what I prioritize, is not “best.” I want to roll with it more often. And not without a clever zinger that might have been better cut out. The first sentence is evocative and interesting, and then we spend another several sentences just setting the mundane scene of a post-climate disaster world. Russell’s stories have a tendency to start with a strong image and then move quickly to tell the reader what’s going on. I will say that the rest of that paragraph has me a bit wary, though. I grew up in a town called Eugene, in the shadow of mountains that were unreachable by my third birthday. An evocative name, a name I loved and mispronounced with reverence at age eleven. The school was on the outskirts of a Red Zone in our family’s ancestral breeding grounds-“Oregon” on the older maps, the ones from my boyhood. My daughter had never set foot inside an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar school, and seemed more intrigued by the idea of seeing a chalkboard than by the birds. ![]() We were trespassing, but it seemed highly unlikely we’d be caught-the school had been abandoned since the previous century, when ash from the Great Western Fires made most of the region unlivable. I led the way through the woods because I didn’t want my daughter to have her first encounter with the ghost flock alone. And it’s the perfect season to sit down and read one of her strange, often creepy and unsettling stories! And the first line of the first paragraph have me excited. I have loved so many of Karen Russell’s stories in the past that I’m ecstatic to see her return to the pages of The New Yorker.
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