Birds of Paradise: A Novel [Paperback]

Diana Abu-Jaber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2012

“A full-course meal, a rich, complex and memorable story that will leave you lingering gratefully at [Abu-Jaber’s] table.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

At thirteen, Felice Muir ran away from home to punish herself for some horrible thing she had done—leaving a hole in the hearts of her pastry-chef mother, her real estate attorney father, and her foodie-entrepreneurial brother. After five years of scrounging for food, drugs, and shelter on Miami Beach, Felice is now turning eighteen, and she and the family she left behind must reckon with the consequences of her actions—and make life-affirming choices about what matters to them most, now and in the future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“It is Birds of Paradise’s neither predictable nor merely haphazard momentum and its rich cast of characters that make us feel we’re in deliciously capable hands.” (Bliss Broyard - Elle )

“An unusually satisfying read.” (Susanna Sonnenberg - More )

“Miami comes alive . . . the ambitions and accents of its inhabitants become as impossible to resist as a postprandial siesta in the tropics.” (Cristina Garcia - New York Times Book Review )

“Brilliant… Birds of Paradise is likely to add further luster to [Abu-Jaber’s] literary reputation. … With her evocative prose and accomplished style, Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise explores with wisdom and insight the emotional fallout of a shattering family crisis. Yet in this profoundly moving novel, she also manages to unearth the inherent, cathartic beauty of family and individual survival in this complex and perilous new century.” (Washington Times )

“A meticulous, deeply moving portrayal of imperfect human beings struggling to do right… Glorious descriptions, both of nature and Avis’s mouthwatering pastry, offset yet intensify the jagged emotions of the Muirs.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Abu-Jaber makes us wonder about more that what will happen to one girl with a guilty secret. What, after all, does it mean to be a family? Is love really “exchangeable, malleable”? We can’t help turning pages full of stunning prose to find out.” (Sarah Nelson - O Magazine )

About the Author

Diana Abu-Jaber is the award-winning author of Origin, Crescent, Arabian Jazz, and The Language of Baklava. Her writing has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Ms., Salon, Vogue, Gourmet, the New York Times, The Nation, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She divides her time between Coral Gables, Florida, and Portland, Oregon.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (May 7, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039334259X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393342598
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #662,104 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diana Abu-Jaber's latest novel, Birds of Paradise, won the National Arab American Book Award and was named a top book pick by the Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune, and the Oregonian.

Her previous Origin, is a literary psychological thriller which has received starred reviews from both Publisher's Weekly and Booklist and won the Northwest Booksellers Award.

Her memoir-with-recipes, entitled The Language of Baklava, was a Border's Original Voices selection and was included in Best Food Writing 2005. It also won the 2006 Northwest Booksellers' Award.

Her novel, Crescent (W.W. Norton), won the PEN Center Award for Literary fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. It was also named a Notable Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor. Her first novel, Arabian Jazz (W.W. Norton) won the Oregon Book award.

Abu-Jaber currently teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland, Oregon and Miami, Florida.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Diana Abu-Jaber captures a family's grief and a cookie's soul September 8, 2011

By Susan Tunis TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Tolstoy said, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In Diana Abu-Jaber's fourth novel, the Muirs of Miami are a deeply unhappy family. The tale is set in the days leading up to daughter, Felice's, 18th birthday. Her mother, Avis, is a talented pastry chef, running a high-end bakery out of their home. Her father, Brian, is a successful real estate attorney. And at 23, her older brother, Stanley, is running a business he's passionate about. These are privileged people with every reason to be content, but when Felice was only 13 years old, she ran away from home. She didn't run far. She's still in Miami, a "beach kid," sleeping outdoors or squatting in houses. But there's been virtually no contact with her family since she left, and it's torn them apart.

This is not a story of abuse or addiction--although there is abuse and there are drugs in her story. No, Felice was a supremely lovely and loved child being raised by flawed, but essentially good, people. And part of the suspense of the novel is the motivation for Felice's actions. No one can understand why this young girl went off the rails. At one point her father asks himself:

"What. What should he and Avis have done? Put their girl's face on a milk carton?
Missing: Felice Muir, Age 13.
Kidnapped by herself.
Motivation: Unknown
What child does such a thing as that? Could she have been that unhappy?"

The story is told in chapters that alternate between Avis's, Brian's, and Felice's points of view, until Stanley has his say near the novel's end. Based on this overly simple summary, Birds of Paradise sounds like a Lifetime original movie. Nothing could be further from the truth!... Diana Abu-Jaber is a lush, evocative novelist capturing subtle emotions and interplays amongst her characters. There is all the grief and confusion you would expect of a family in this situation, but beyond the family unit, there are dangerous friendships and complicated interactions. There is so much happening on so many levels.

Abu-Jaber captures the atmospheric otherness of her setting. ("She remembers how Hannah hated everything about Miami--even some of the best things, like the hooked-nosed white ibises roaming around in the grass and the flowers that blew up into winter foliage--a tree or bush opening overnight into flower like perfumed flames.") And not just the exotic physicality of the place, but the uneasy clash of cultures. ("She'd felt disorientation strong as vertigo after they'd first moved to Miami--as if her magnetic poles had been switched. The drivers were appalling, punching their horns, running reds, cutting each other off like sworn enemies. There were certain shops and restaurants one would not wish to enter unless one spoke Spanish--and not at her halting, college intermediate level, either. There were whole neighborhoods and sections of town where she felt scrutinized and sized up. How many times had she waited by counters while salespeople went in search of `the one' who spoke English?")

Another reviewer described the novel as layered, and that is apt. On the surface, you have the story being told, the family drama. But in other layers, you've got the all kinds of subtext--the psychology of the characters, the social commentary, the time and the place. And there are external stressors ratcheting up tension as the book progresses: a husband's temptation, the danger of the streets, financial crises, and physical jeopardy.

The language is as sumptuous as the rich desserts that Avis creates, and fans of the author won't be surprised by the attention she lavishes on food within the text. Again, beyond mere description, the reader must ponder what is being said about sustenance, nurturing, creativity, privilege. The novel's opening sentence reads, "A cookie, Avis told her children, is a soul." Things are often more than they may at first seem in Abu-Jaber's adept hands. A cookie is more than a cookie, and a family is more than the tragedy that defines it. Read more ›

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber December 20, 2011

By Marvi

Format:Hardcover

There's not much backbone here on which this author can hang her lush prose and unusual imagery. Other readers have pointed out how hard it is to swallow many of the central and peripheral elements of this plot, but there's also a coldness--not only in Felice, but also in Stanley and Nieves--that's alienating. Even at the end, Felice leaves the reaching out entirely to her mother. It's hard to care about characters who demonstrate their capacity for caring only to a select few.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "For one night, at least, Felice hoped the judgment was over." August 31, 2011

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Abu-Jaber's provocative portrait of a Miami family is as rich and fragrant as the Florida landscape, as fascinating as the diverse culture and a testament to the author's maturity as a writer. Expanding her love of food and its deep connections to family and identity, the author positions the Muir family amid the lush vegetation of a lovely home, a mother's kitchen palace of sugared confections and the hollow echoes of devastating family loss: Felice has inexplicably run away from home at thirteen, her eighteenth birthday looming; Stanley has foregone an expected college education for his dream, a sustainable food co-op; Brian is an attorney for an avaricious Miami developer; and Avis seeks refuge in the perfection of her specialty desserts, artistically rendered- and expensive- much in demand by high-profile customers. Felice rarely makes contact, Brian and Avis at odds with how best to survive their beautiful daughter's defection; Stanley has claimed his own future, with a girlfriend who sets Avis's teeth on edge with her air of self-possession.

In succulent pieces, like bites of Avis's delicious creations, we learn the particular flavors of each family member, Brian in his ivory tower of privilege, surrounded by the arrogance of an acquisitive corporate culture, flirting with his fading youth and loss of focus, Stanley fighting to keep his financial enterprise afloat and Avis spinning a flurry of sugar and flour, the ingredients of a magical world, as fleeting as her dream of a perfect family and as elusive as the heart-stopping screams of a neighboring mynah bird, whose sometimes plaintive cries mimic the lament of a lost child.... Saddest is the impulsive Felice, her beauty bestowing a false sense of security, driven from home by a secret that has seared her spirit to a more fragile and marginal existence with other runaways who squat in vacant mansions, as careless of their own histories as the places they disdainfully inhabit. What seems an intimate family drama is, in fact, a far-reaching indictment of societal isolation, political violence and the loss of identity, a vista surrounded by both beauty and decay, cities overrun in a clash of poverty and gentrification. As internally storm-tossed as the approaching Hurricane Katrina that will spill them all upon less familiar shores, well-tended lives will be eviscerated by the truth of their impoverishment.

Abu-Jaber captures it all in a mélange of private revelations, self-doubts, unexpressed yearnings- and for Felice, a life and death decision. Avis and Brian have separate epiphanies, Avis profoundly affected by Solange, her Haitian neighbor, who reluctantly draws Avis into a charmed circle of otherness, tragedy and excruciating insight, her exotic adjoining garden as mysterious and fecund as Solange's heartbreaking story. Tormented, Felice wanders a trash-strewn beach, all momentarily forgotten in a drugged haze until violence teaches her the fallacy of her own logic ("For years she assumed that the worst possible thing has already happened."). The author's vision has expanded over time, become more universal and accessible, the plot building slowly, but gaining in intensity like Katrina, as satisfying as Stanley's life-sustaining staples and as ethereal as Avis Muir's sugared confections: "Minds and bodies tell one story... but the now burns everything in its oven." Luan Gaines/2011. Read more ›

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars 4 out of 5 did not like this book in my book club December 1, 2011

By Gr8ful VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

My book club read Crescent by the same author a couple of years ago and we all gave it a thumbs up but Birds of Paradise was a disappointment. Four of us flat out did not like it and one thought it had more redeeming qualities than the rest of us.

We all thought that the author brought realistic heartbreaking accounts of how a tragedy can affect each family member. Most of the characters weren't overly likeable which didn't help matters and the book was just depressing, filled with loneliness, emptiness, and dragged on and on.

I think the author over-described things to the point of making the book tedious. I also had a tough time believing some of the things she describes which I'll list in the comments but won't put them in the review so it won't be a spoiler.

Can't say I'd recommend this one. If you haven't read Crescent by this author, give it a try.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars My Book Club Loved this Book May 24, 2012

By Mel

Format:Paperback

My book club read the book and we loved it. Five librarians are hard to please, but this book did the job. We all loved the portrayal of these real and well developed characters. The descriptive language pulled me in so much that at one point I could have sworn that I could smell the cookies baking is the main character's kitchen. I would recommend this book to readers who typically don't read realistic fiction. I'm a mystery lover myself, but this story was an accessible and enjoyable read.