Plumage [Hardcover]

Nancy Springer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 2000

Nancy Springer has written a poignant, funny, achingly beautiful novel of a woman's reawakening, startlingly original and suffused with magic-a timely fable wit gorgeous multicolored feathers that soars proud and high.

When she was young, he had meant it kindly. Back when they were first married. Later, as she got older and gravity took hold, he had said it far less kindly. She was turning into a bird, he said disgustedly. Like her mother. That was why he had left her.

If Sassy Hummel were indeed as "sassy" as her name, perhaps she would have been better prepared to cope with the abrupt downward turn her life had taken. Dumped for a younger, skinnier trophy wife by husband Frederick after twenty-seven years of devoted marital servitude, she has been forced to accept the only job marriage prepared her for: that of a menial in the gloriously upscale Sylvan Tower Hotel. Though generally exhausting and demeaning, working as a maid has a few small advantages-most important, her newfound friendship with Racquel, the outspoken, no-nonsense proprietor of PLUMAGE, the hotel's pricey, feathertherned boutique. Other than that, though, there is little joy to be found in endless carpet vacuuming and the cleaning of countless toilets.

But then a tiny bird inexplicably appears in the opulent six-tiered Sylvan Tower lobby. And once it sets its sights on Sassy, unusual things begin to happen. Suddenly the image her mirror reflects back is not one of a dumpy, middle-aged woman with low self-esteem. Instead, a stunning cobalt-blue parakeet returns her stare. What's more, the reflections of the staff and patrons she sees in the hotel's gleaming glass walls are not people at all, but birds of every size, sort, and demeanor: preening and puffed up, scraggly and gray, flighty and predatory.

Something remarkable has happened to hitherto unremarkable Sassy Hummel, enabling her to see beyond the fine-feathered facades people hide behind to the true nature of the bird underneath. And now that Sassy Hummel has lost her own reflection, she has little choice but to follow her mysterious new avian compatriot into the unknown world that lies beyond the mirror's surface. For only there can she hope to recover her soul ... and discover her wings.

Wise and compelling, witty and warm, inspiring and magical, Plumage is an exhilarating new high in the already much-lauded literary career of the exceptional Nancy Springer. To read it is to fly.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Budgies and a midlife crisis catapult a sorrowful heroine into a magical world of self-discovery and love, as the prolific Springer (Fair Peril) continues her theme of feminist-inspired fantasy. The aptly named Sassy Hummel gains some much needed spunk when she learns to take a bird's-eye view of life. Sassy's husband of 27 years has just run off with a sweet young thing, her mother has Alzheimer's, she's lost her house, been forced to sell her jewelry, and now the only job she's qualified for is maid at the posh Sylvan Tower Hotel. To make matters worse, a bird in the hotel atrium just pooped on her head. After the statuesque, brightly festooned Racquel (owner of the hotel's upscale boutique, Plumage) cleans her up, Sassy takes a peek in the mirror to assess the damage. Instead of her own reflection, she sees a little blue budgie. As a matter of fact, Sassy begins seeing birds everywhere: some people are cranes and some are crows; Racquel appears to be a large, colorful male hornbill. Worried that others will think her nuts, Sassy keeps this secret gift to herself. Racquel is concealing her own whopper of a secret and, before long, the two heroines find themselves stumbling through a looking glass into the forest of lost dreams, where it is up to Sassy to find her true self again. In creating the character of Racquel, a girlfriend with a difference, Springer has redefined the concept of "knight in shining armor." With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun. Instead of "What's your sign?" perhaps readers of this airborne novel will start asking each other, "If you were a bird, what kind would you be?" (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A writer's writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman." -- --Jennifer Roberson

"Irresistible...charming, eccentric...thoughtful and significant." -- --Kirkus Reviews

"Nancy Springer writes like a dream." -- --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Perennial; 1st edition (November 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380801205
• ISBN-13: 978-0380801206
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,288,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist." I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the "melting pot" because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.

My "conform" phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college -- Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. it was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and "happenings." Instead, I married a preacher's son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer's wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.

Here beginneth the "go crazy" phase.

Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear "voices" in my head. First they whispered "divorce" (not permissible), and later they hissed "suicide". They scared me silly. I couldn't sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish "The White Hart" and "The Silver Sun"--yet not one of the doctors of shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on "helping" poor little me "adjust" to being a housewife, mother, and pastor's wife.

Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage--or desperation--to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.

"I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing," I said to my husband.

"Fine," he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.

Conform, go crazy--or become an artist.

By becoming a writer--by becoming who I truly was--I became well.

It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In "The Black Beast, The Golden Swan" and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In "Chains of Gold" and "The Hex Witch of Seldom" I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children's books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in "Apocalypse"--whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn't thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor's wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. "Larque on the Wing"--whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I'd never dreamed were in me.

It's been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing "Fair Peril"--a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband's infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I've ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all to similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn't go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.

Now married to a rather remarkable second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband's hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a real house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Life is an adventure and I mean that sincerely.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The author speaks, February 22, 2001

By 

Nancy Springer (Lake Meade, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plumage (Hardcover)

It must have been while I was going to all those singles dances that I became fascinated by mating rituals, and decided to write about a woman getting back into fancy feathers after almost three decades of marriage. I knew how hard it was to do this, and how difficult to get back into courtship dances and billing and cooing... Stuck in a bird metaphor, I researched bowerbirds and budgies and hoatzins and such, becoming even more engrossed. Hey, all sorts of women's issues are incarnated in grackles and cassowaries and geese. I discovered that birds and humans have a lot more in common than just walking on two legs. Wow, do avian relationships parallel human ones! Birds of a feather share household chores together, but in species that glorify the male...watch out. Gender Inequality Alert. And how does my dowdy, dumped, middle-aged heroine, poor little Sassy, feel about that?

Hmmm...Of course, there are some important differences between birds and people:

1) In avian species in which the genders differ in appearance, the male gets to wear the fancy feathers. Of course, in humans, there are drag queens.... Enter Racquel, my other main character.

2) In birds, mating is done via cloaca. Only waterfowl have...um, to put it crudely, only ducks have ... . And how does Racquel feel about that?

3) Birds can fly. That's a real, real important difference. Does Sassy want to fly?

Don't we all?

I'm a funny little bird myself, I guess, to be thinking about these things. By the time I got finished writing PLUMAGE, I almost felt like I could eat pokeweed and crap purple. But there's a lot more to life -- and PLUMAGE -- than just fun and fancy feathers. Being able to fly has a lot to do with remembering how.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply Wonderful, March 14, 2001

By 

Robert Goldrick "Bob G" (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Plumage (Hardcover)

I purchased Plumage because it received a favorable review in an article on several books that addressed "women's issues" from different perspectives. To be honest, I wasn't all that interested in issue-oriented fiction, but it also sounded like it might be a good read. It hung around the house for quite a while before I picked it up one day and discovered that it is better than a good read - it's a great read.

Plumage is one of those novels that restores your faith in - indeed, rekindles your memory of - the pleasure of a wonderful story. You are quickly drawn into the plot, which is quite imaginative, and slowly but surely come to feel the world through Sassy's eyes. The author's choice of words is not self-consciously artsy; yet her descriptions of the natural world (and particularly its colors and textures) are very evocative and perfectly integrated into the story itself.

I won't reveal any of that story, as it should be experienced first-hand. But I will tell you that while reading it I found myself thinking of the child I once was, and how I experienced the world back then, and how all of us lose something as we make the transition to our adult selves, something that we can occasionally reclaim - at least in part.

The plot is compelling and the resolution completely satisfying, but the real pleasure is in the journey itself. I am not a big fan of fantasy - I'd rather read Dostoevsky than Tolkien - but Plumage appeals on multiple levels. It appeals to both your "sense of the sensible" and your sense of wonder. Highly recommended; a fine-feathered find.