More About Yellow Birds
Yellow Birds is set just before the digital revolution, Kait is a young woman searching for identity and community among the cast-outs, cast-offs, and other “misfit toys” who refer to themselves as the Yellow Birds and follow a band called the Open Road from town to town.
Just as Kait believes she has found her place among a group of Birds travelling together in a messy van, a young man with the eye-roll worthy name of Horizon sits beside her one night and alters her fragile plan for the foreseeable future.
Amidst the whirlwind of the Open Road Tour, their growing feelings for one another soar to ecstatic heights, while propelling them toward an impending reckoning with their troubled pasts.
Filled with sex, drugs, music, and even cults, readers won't be able to get enough of this bohemian love story, the groupie lifestyle, and the party within the party.
More About Karen Green
Karen Green's poetry, essays, articles, and fiction has been published widely. She is the author of two books for very young readers and has contributed to several anthologies. Karen wrote the popular blog, The Kids are Alright for more than a decade, and worked as a writer in the music industry for many years.
Yellow Birds, a bohemian road-tripping adventure of a love story, is her first novel.
Thoughts on Yellow Birds
Confession time...I'm terrible with music. I can't remember artists, lyrics, tunes. Except for a few music videos from the 80s embedded in my memory, I rely on my husband for all information musical. So when I plunged into Yellow Birds I wasn't hopeful that this was the book for me.
Although I started Yellow Birds expecting it to be about a band's tour, I quickly realized it was much more. Yellow Birds is a novel that explores the meaning of family. Who is our family? How elastic are the strings that bond us to our family? What do want from a family? It was enlightening to think about family through the lens of fans following a musical group. It stripped away all the blood and marriage "musts" of family membership to allow Kait to try on a variety of families she needed or wanted. Part of me wanted Green to delve deeper into the characters' motivation while another part realized that the superficial nature of many of the relationships matched the nature of the musical tour community.
A Little Extra
I've had Yellow Birds for a while (thanks to Rebecca Eckler of RE:Books!) but since Woodstock was held on August 15 to August 17, 1969 today seemed like the perfect day for a review Technically, this book isn't about Woodstock but it is about the people who followed(or still follow) musical groups, some searching for that mysterious something missing in their day to day. Happy 55th anniversary of Woodstock! ✌️
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