The Bird Catcher [Hardcover]

Laura Jacobs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

Margret Snow is the quintessential New York woman.  She dresses the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue by day and mingles in the downtown art world by night, always searching for her niche in a city intent on capturing The Next Big Thing as it flies into view.  Married to Charles, a professor at Columbia, and living on the Upper West Side, the backdrop to Margret’s life is made up of the poetic rhythms and colors of the Manhattan day: slow-running buses, the gray morning light striking the Hudson, the winter landscape of Riverside Park, the endless round of gallery openings, cocktail parties and grand dinners in the palatial apartments on Manhattan’s upper east side.  Against this metropolitan whirl, Margret and Charles pursue a lifelong hobby of bird watching, a passion for which was kindled by her grandfather during long-past summers near the shore in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As they shuttle between their Manhattan apartment, birding in the city's parks, and weekends out of town in their house near Cape May, a violent upheaval pushes Margret beyond the boundaries of her hobby.  Overnight, she becomes an art world sensation and just as suddenly has fame ripped from her.   As Laura Jacobs proved in her first novel, "Women About Town", she understands the natural habitat of the New York Woman in all its complexity.  In The Bird Catcher, her second, she moves deeper into that territory with the story of a remarkable woman who is as rare and special as the birds that fill the skies above her.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest from Vanity Fair contributing editor Jacobs (Women About Town) has, at its core, a charming story about a grieving widow reborn, but it's pockmarked by pretentious dialogue and flat characters. Margret Snow quits her Ph.D. program in art to escape the romantic feelings she has toward her bird-watching partner (and Columbia University adviser), Charles Ashur. She whiles her time away as a window display designer at Saks and eventually works up the courage to confess her feelings, and they marry. Margret's memories shift between her and Charles's early bird-watching days and their marriage. But the most vivid parts of the novel are set in the gloomy present, when Margret, now a widow, throws herself in a new artistic direction that involves dead birds. Her connection to the dead sparrows and warblers seems more natural than the off-key relationships she has with the living, and her isolation from family and friends raises the question why she tries to keep the connections alive, while the grating banter between Margret and Charles only serves to caricaturize them. (June)
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Review

Advance Praise for The Bird Catcher:
"Laura Jacobs is an urban miniaturist. In her sleek, pitch-perfect second novel, The Bird Catcher, she lavishes delectable attention on the subtle distinctions wrought by taste, class, money, and style in the city on which she trains her eagle eye. But there is nothing diminutive in her vision: Under the force of her piercing, halogen-bright gaze, the world cracks open, large and luminous. . . . One of the novel's keenest pleasures is watching Margret's transformation from passive spectator to active creator . . . No minor feat, this, and without sounding a single wrong note, Jacobs orchestrates her character's sonata as expansively and dramatically as a symphony whose strains linger on, long after the last page has been turned." --Bookforum
". . . Margret moves in rarefied Manhattan circles populated with artists, dancers, and collectors. The parties and guests glitter, conversations soar. . . . Jacobs presents a measured and compelling yet nonlinear narrative so that readers encounter Margret's life in pieces. And it is well worth the effort to get to know her. Jacobs' incisive writing captures her characters' moods, while her graceful descriptions of the birds that inspire her protagonist illuminate the story."--Booklist
 "An enchanting tick for the Reader's Life List."--Vanity Fair
"Jacobs explores, with pitch-perfect accuracy, both the surface layer of contemporary urban life, and the wild, almost dumb depths of the psyche, where humans confer with birds, and where art, myth and fairytale are born.  Margret, the book's grieving heroine, will haunt readers long after her compulsively readable story has come to an end."- Elizabeth Kendall, author of Autobiography of A Wardrobe and American Daughter
"Intricately detailing the lengths to which a woman must go to heal from a great loss, Laura Jacobs mesmerizes with her haunting prose and thoroughly engrossing subject matter. The Birdcatcher is one of those reads you cannot put down, nor forget once you have finished.” - Amy Scheibe, author of What Do You Do all Day?
 “Birds are transformed into art in this wise novel of rebirth, but they are also transforming – people are brought back to imaginative and spiritual life through contact with them, and it is part of the magic of this urban story that it has roots deep in the mystery of the natural world.” - Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature

Praise for Women About Town:

"Jacobs writes with intelligence, grace, and an utterly female sensibility."--People Magazine
"[An] engaging debut novel...Exquisite."--The Washington Post
"Jane Austen meets Sex and the City..."--Us Weekly

"Funny, and as nuanced as a broken-in Armani jacket."--The Boston Globe

"Jacobs has written a stylish first novel, the perfect book for readers tired of all those shopworn, familiar novelist names."--The Wall Street Journal
"[An] Enchanting first novel...Women About Town is immensely fun to read."--Victoria Magazine
"Breezy, urbane."--Harper's Bazaar

"...bold storytelling reminiscent of feminist literary icons Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf...resonates with keen, pitch-perfect observations."--Avenue Magazine

"Irresistible...the book's greatest pleasure likes in Jacobs' sensitivity to self consciousness."--Newsday

"Jacobs laces a gossipy guilty pleasure with feeling and sophisticated wit."--Publishers Weekly

"Quiet prose and well-developed characters distinguish this insightful look at the lives of today's career woman."--Booklist

"Jacobs takes us into the inside world of Vanity Fair and captures its pulse and tempo with exquisite sense and sensibility of a Jane Austen."--Gloria Vanderbilt

"Women About Town is smart in all senses of the world: stylish, intelligent, fresh. Save it for a bad day: it will make you happy. Laura Jacobs is something rarer than a promising first novelist--a generous one."--Judith Thurman

"Laura Jacob's writing is winsome, knowing, and cool; her observant novel is like a quick dip in the Lincoln Center foutain."--Meg Wolitzer

"Women About Town is elegant and witty and charming--much like its charaacters, women who have talent and style and that most marvelous of Manhattan chracteristics: moxie. Laura Jacobs is our new Dawn Powell, but with a more generous heart."--Kevin Sessums

"Women About Town is a fine, stylish novel, ostensibly about the lives of sophisticated New Yorkers. In reality, it is an honest, moving story about and for women everywhere."--Nancy Friday

"Charming, funny, beautifully written and compulsively readable, Women about Town is a sheer delight.--Dani Shapiro

"Jane Austen would be proud."--Rosie Magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312540221
• ISBN-13: 978-0312540227
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,090,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bird Catcher Catches Your Heart, July 7, 2009

By 

Chicago Reader (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Bird Catcher (Hardcover)

The Bird Catcher will heartbreakingly catch your heart. Its prose is simple, yet complex. It is rich in symbolism, but the symbolism does not get in the way of its good story. Told partly in the present and partly in flashback, it is the story of a young woman who makes unusual choices, on the one hand, and traditional choices, on the other. It demonstrates the strength of the bond between women as well as the strength of the bond between a man and a woman. I unabashedly cared about what happened to the Bird Catcher, and I loved, fretted and grieved right along with her. I highly recommend this book. It would make a perfect gift, too.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative and Lovely, August 28, 2009

By 

M. Sokoloff "investigative explorer" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bird Catcher (Hardcover)

"The Bird Catcher" brings to mind both "The Tatoo Artist" and "The Incredible Lightness of Being", all three books managing to capture the poignance and elusiveness of life on this planet in all its forms. I found myself re-reading particularly beautiful passages several times. The metaphor of birds as souls, the wonderfully visual descriptions of the "bird catcher's" art, the sensory evocation of New York City's hidden pockets of wildness and unseen tragedies, the depiction of betrayals, losses and connections were all beautifully handled. I would definitely read this book again and, in fact, will add it to my library of "special books" bought for that purpose.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended, July 11, 2009

By 

L. Raimondo (Evanston, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bird Catcher (Hardcover)

Margret Snow is passionate about birds, a feeling she shares with her husband, Charles. For Margret, bird-watching represents more than an escape from her uninspiring job as a window-dresser at Saks Fifth Avenue, and the artificiality of the Manhattan social scene. Observing the beauty, fragility, and innocence of these wild creatures gives her access to another kind of window, into the uncharted regions of her soul, and the mystic communion between man and beast that survives, improbably, amid the concrete and steel boxes of the modern urban landscape. So when tragedy strikes Margret, uprooting her comfortable existence and sending her into a tailspin of grief, it is natural that she seeks solace in her lifelong hobby. But what begins as a quest to make sense of her loss turns into something far more dangerous -- and potentially life-changing -- when Margret embarks upon a project to save fallen birds from oblivion, unleashing an artistic vision that becomes a metaphor for rebirth and the resilience of the human spirit.

In The Bird Catcher, Laura Jacobs has written a haunting, lyrical tale that deserves to be read, if not cherished, by bird-watchers and fiction lovers alike.