Libby Barnett saw what happened, but the adults in her small town don’t believe her.
On a spring day in 1933, a strange man with a not-quite-friendly smile appeared in Libby’s backyard. Like a figure from a dark fairy tale, he worked a staggering transformation on Libby’s younger sister, and the little girl was lost.
Blaming herself, longing to win her mother’s forgiveness and love, 13-year-old Libby becomes unshakable in her determination to find her sister. When a young drifter offers help, she gambles on his trustworthiness and sets out with him into the dangerous vagrant underground of the Great Depression.
She has barely begun to realize what it will take to survive in these treacherous new surroundings when she finds she has entered an underworld even more secretive and terrifying. In this hidden reality, practitioners of a barbaric, costly magic use stolen children as tools to harness power.
It is from the most lethal of these men that Libby must recover her sister. She is willing to give everything, but it won’t be enough.
With its gripping blend of matter-of-fact realism and supernatural horror, The Birds of the Air is perfect for fans of Stephen Graham Jones, Andrew Michael Hurley, and Victor LaValle, and for fans of classics like That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis. It tells the story of a young girl who must summon a kind of courage different from the swaggering audacity that often claims the name.
Some might scorn this courage as weakness.
They will learn.
