Name: Imperfect Birds
Rating: 5 (0 reviews)
Author: Anne Lamott

About this book

Summary

Book Summary

Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent - she aced AP physics; athletic - a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family's move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn't been as bumpy as Elizabeth feared.

But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them - and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.

This is Anne Lamott's most honest and heartrending novel yet, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.

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Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Straddling a line between heartwarming and heartbreaking, this novel is Lamott at her most witty, observant, and psychologically astute. " - Publishers Weekly

"As she eschews the cunning one-liners and wry observations that had become her signature stock-in-trade, Lamott produces her most stylistically mature and thematically circumspect novel to date." - Booklist

"Starred Review. Lamott is consistently wonderful with this type of novel, and once again she does not disappoint." - Library Journal

"In the end, the strengths of central characters and believable complications overcome a tendency toward oracular psychobabble." - Kirkus Reviews

This information about Imperfect Birds was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Dan Edelstein

Say it again
Really disappointing. I've read a few of Anne's books and they've been going downhill since the first. This book is so repetitive and tedious and really pretty trite. We get the picture within the first few pages, and then we get it over and over ad nauseum. If there was something provocative or interesting about the writing, the endless repetition would be forgivable, but unfortunately that isn't the case. This is a book about character in which the characters are types rather than actual human beings. They lack any specificity, as does Ms. Lamott's (or at least the narrator's) observations of the world. I just don't buy any of it. Yes, teenagers sometimes use drugs and sometimes deceive their parents about it. These are things that I knew before reading the book. Unfortunately, I don't know anything more about it after having read the book. Anne seems to be faking her way through this book. She doesn't believe it herself.
This is particularly disappointing because, judging by the few times I've heard her interviewed on the radio, she's charming and funny and has a fairly unique perspective on the world, especially regarding faith. None of that comes through in this book. Nothing feels true.

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Author Information

Biography
Books by this Author

Anne Lamott Author Biography

Anne Lamott is the author of twenty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Help, Thanks, Wow; Dusk, Night, Dawn; Traveling Mercies; and Bird by Bird, as well as seven novels. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California with her family.

Author Interview