Buying Options

Kindle Price:	$9.99
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers Price set by seller.

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Enter a promotion code or Gift Card

Share <Embed>

White Bird In A Blizzard by [Laura Kasischke]

Follow the Author

Laura Kasischke

White Bird In A Blizzard Kindle Edition

by Laura Kasischke (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

85 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$41.74

$42.97

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon—pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance—and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone.

Laura Kasischke's first novel. Suspicious River. was hailed by the critics as "extremely powerful" (The Los Angeles Times), "amazing" (The Boston Globe), and "a novel of depth, beauty, and insight" (The Seattle Times). Now Kasischke follows up her auspicious debut with a spellbinding and erotic tale of marriage, secrets, and self-deception.

When Katrina Connors' mother walks out on her family one frigid January day, Kat is surprised but not shocked; the whole year she has been "becoming sixteen"—falling in love with the boy next door, shedding her baby fat, discovering sex—her mother has slowly been withdrawing. As Kat and her father pick up the pieces of their daily life, she finds herself curiously unaffected by her mother's absence. But in dreams that become too real to ignore, she's haunted by her mother's cries for help. . . .

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

July 15, 2014
File size

680 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Laura Kasischke
32
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $14.39
Laura Kasischke
51
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $13.49
Laura Kasischke
115
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $5.99
Laura Kasischke
8
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Laura Kasischke
227
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.49
Laura Kasischke
13
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $11.99

Create your FREE Amazon Business account to save up to 10% with Business-only prices and free shipping. Register today

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four crucial years in a troubled teenager's life are the focus of this eloquently written, suspenseful second novel by the author of the praised Suspicious River. Having grown up in an extraordinarily suffocating atmosphere, 16-year-old Kat Connors greets her mother's disappearance one winter day with stoic calm. Kat is overweight, lives in a cookie-cutter suburb, feels her heavy figure makes her a social outcast?and yet has a pivotal adolescent sexual experience. Readers who find similarities between Kat and Delores Price, the heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, will also see eerie similarities in Kat's tense relationship with her mother (both mothers have birds as pets, in one case a parakeet, in the other a canary; the girls' fathers hate them; subsequently, both birds are found dead at the bottom of their cages). In both novels, mother and daughter end up sleeping with the same man without the daughter's knowledge. Like Delores, Kat sees a psychiatrist who becomes a father figure to her. Both heroines lose weight and triumph over their traumatic experiences, and each experiences the unexpected death of her mother. Despite these similarities, Kasischke's heroine is a fully rounded, distinctively portrayed character?a self-centered, typically hormone-crazed teenager who painstakingly develops into a self-aware young woman. Kasischke movingly charts her progress into a person, a young lady who learns to trust her instincts and her misgivings about the truth behind her mother's disappearance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

At the start of Kasischke's second novel (after Suspicious River, Houghton, 1996), 16-year-old Katrina Connor is struggling to come of age in suburban Ohio. Preoccupied with sex and dating and eager to separate from parents she sees as terminally boring, she largely ignores her mother's efforts to lure her into closeness. Then, on a frigid January day, her mother vanishes. Sure, she had often complained about the dullness of marriage. But don't all full-time homemakers long for more, Katrina wonders? Why would she simply take off, without a trace? As the truth of Evie Connor's disappearance emerges, the reader is treated to a cacophony of raw teenage emotion. Shadowy dreams in which a beguiling Evie appears to Katrina enhance Kasischke's mysterious but always poetic prose. The soft, almost ethereal language makes the horrifying reality at the core of the book shockingly powerful, the hidden underside of a quintessentially normal domestic tableau. Highly recommended.?Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Poet Kasischkes second novel (after Suspicious River, 1996) is a mix of the fine and the irritating that glides slowly downward to an airy nothing. Life in suburban Garden Heights, Ohio, becomes at once more exciting and more miserable for teenaged Katrina Connors when she falls in love with classmate and next-door neighbor Phil: the new-found sex is wonderful, but Katrinas already exceeding-strange mother gets suddenly all the more antagonistic, cruel, and unpredictableand then disappears entirely, never to be heard from again except for one phone call (or so Kat believes) declaring shell never come home again. Good riddance, many a reader will say, to this woman who through boredom, sexual unhappiness, ingrained habit, pure spite, and unmitigated meanness routinely derided her admittedly dull-witted husband (a school administrator named Brock) and did no better by her daughter, choosing her name because She wanted a cat, overfondling her in childhood, then manically humiliating her in teenhood when Phil comes on the scene. Nevertheless, Moms disappearance triggers a sense of enormous emptiness in Kat (there are no adjectives for this lightness I feel, this whiteness) that gets labeled anxiety disorder, parallels suburban Ohios emptiness itself, and takes her to a psychoanalyst, wherewell, where the books trouble begins, seeming uncertain where to go next. A year will pass, two, then three; Kat starts college; Phil and Kat break up; we meet eccentric grandmothers, Phils mother (shes blind), Kats girlfriends (they smoke, drink, and gossip in the basement), the Detective Scieziesciez (its pronounced shh-shh-shh), whom Kat seduces (hes more manly than Dad), beginning a long affair; and then, and then . . . . Then all will end surprisingly indeed, with Mom, as it happens, never having left home at all, but just, wellchilling out. Ambitious writing in equal parts elegant and excessive, with a psychology that spins out of control and goes poof. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Laura Kasischke teaches creative writing in Ann Arbor, Michigan. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00L78HBQK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial (July 15, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 15, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 680 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #909,598 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #7,023 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
- #7,332 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #8,622 in Coming of Age Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
85 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Laura Kasischke

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Laura Kasischke teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and the Residential College. She has published seven collections of poetry and seven novels. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan.

Customer reviews

5 star		46%
4 star		19%
3 star		14%
2 star		14%
1 star		8%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

villainsrule

Movie is better

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2021

Verified Purchase

I bought this book to put on the shelf next to the dvd of it. I liked the movie much more especially Eva greens portrayal. I like the premise of this book but the author didn’t do a great job. Though it is a quick and easy read, it was just politely executed.

For one, why the obsession with sex? Yes teens may be sexual but come on, what teenage girl is thinking about it 24-7 and why did the author need to describe her losing her virginity? The story was supposed to be about the loss of her mom and not knowing what happened and how it affected her. Not interested in her being horny and not caring about her mom. We don’t need to know how she liked her legs spread open during sex. I mean the movie was just as bad including it but they had to stick to the story. I just found it unrealistic and gross. There is a tasteful way of including a characters sexual appetites without putting off readers, I am an author, I know.

Two, there wasn’t enough about the mother, which is what you’d think the story should focus on. And though yes it is first person in the perspective of the daughter, this story could have probably survived if the entire mother plot was removed; it wouldn’t affect the daughter being a horny dog at all and that’s how you know the story is weak.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Sheree

Tries too Hard

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022

Verified Purchase

I get wanting to be lyrical. And sometimes the writer is able to create a powerful image with her words. And other times...the word choice leaves the reader scratching their heads. Example..."it tasted like something you'd find in a virgins mouth at the beach". Umm. Okay. The characters are not likeable. Not one of them. The ending is a let down.

Helpful

CO_Bradleys

Not a huge plot, but ok.

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book was ok, not my favorite. The thing that kept me reading was wanting to know what happened to the mom. Besides that there really wasn't anything that kept me going. I wasn't wondering about anything else but the mom. It was very wordy and descriptive which can be good but in this case I didn't see the point in it because it didn't really have anything to do what happened to the mom. The ending was a little disappointing. It ends suddenly and there's not much explanation. Some people like those kinds of ending but it just wasn't for me!

Helpful

Susanna Belanger

The premise is better than the book

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2014

Verified Purchase

I picked up this book because I saw the trailer for the movie, and it intrigued me. I can only hope that the movie is less stream of consciousness and has more action. Kat's mother, Eve disappears one frigid January day, and the rest of the book is Kat coming to grips with her mother's disappearance through the events of a normal teenaged girl. The ending seems rushed where other parts are too long or gratuitous.

Helpful

Wendy S The Loving Fifty

so beautiful. I had to stop and re-read sentences and ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book was NEARLY flawless and the writing is superb. Her metaphors ----- ahhh, so beautiful. I had to stop and re-read sentences and paragraphs because they were so expertly written.

But - there is a pretty big element to the plot that is a leap of faith…. I don't want to spoil it or the book here but there is something that happens, actually DOESN'T HAPPEN that is just completely implausible.

Otherwise - heartbreakingly beautiful book and one that I recommended to my sister and others already. Super easy and fast read - done in 24 hours.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Bicyclegirl75

Good

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

Good

Helpful

Hannah Drew

Too predictable for its own good.

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book was too predictable. Before I read it I guessed what happened. If it weren't in the "mystery" genre I would give it a 3.5, as the story of a girl who knows what happened to her mother but somehow manages to ignore even her deepest feelings. The book makes the reader feel like the girl is completely blind to even her own statements and it's annoying, unfortunately. It's a good story but it just is not worth the time to read it since you can figure the entire thing out without picking up the book.

Helpful

M. Casale

Beautiful and Spinechilling

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2018

Verified Purchase

Beautiful writing. Full of true observations on being a daughter, a mother, a teenager, a woman. Scary and beautiful at the same time.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Amazon Customer

I loved this book

Reviewed in Canada on November 15, 2014

Verified Purchase

I loved this book. Loved the story, the writing and poetic flow. I picked this book because I seen on Ellen that there was a movie coming out by this name and figured ah just for the heck of it I'll see if there is a book. I have a thing about reading the book before seeing the movie whenever possible so I got it. Well now that I have read the book and enjoyed it I can't wait to see the movie too.

D. Legare

Univers glaçant

Reviewed in France on December 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

Ambiance glacée dans ce roman de Laura Kasischke. D’habitude Laura Kasischke nous installe d’abord dans une ambiance de normalité avant de nous faire basculer petit à petit dans un monde où rien ne va plus. Ici, d’emblée, le décor est planté dans une famille dysfonctionnelle où la mère disparait par un après-midi très froid du mois de janvier.

J’ai du mal à résister à cette belle phrase d’introduction que je vous livre ‘in English’ car Laura Kasischke a du style, un très joli style :

“I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon - pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance - and disappears.
No one sees her leave, but she is gone.”

C’est à partir de cette phrase glaçante qu'elle nous fait découvrir l’univers familial d’une adolescente, Kat, qui se sent mal aimée par cette mère disparue qui n’avait de cesse de lui faire des remarques humiliantes. C’est une femme froide et sans amour que cette mère, qui tient une maison aseptisée et entretient des rapports aseptisés ou teintés de dégoût avec son mari. Kat, la fille un peu déboussolée, s’efforcera sans relâche de comprendre le pourquoi de cette disparition si soudaine et sans explication, tout en pansant ses blessures affectives.

Un Oiseau Blanc Dans Le Blizzard fait partie des ‘bons’ romans de Laura Kasischke qui nous livre parfois des œuvres inégales. Ici elle tisse un univers glacial, ou tout semble transi sous une fine couche de givre, que ce soient les personnages, leurs sentiments, la maison, ou ce qui les entoure à l’extérieur. L’évocation d’atmosphères très particulières constitue le point fort de Laura Kasischke, c’est là qu’elle excelle, et c’est à partir là qu’elle arrive à nous séduire et à nous entraîner jusqu’au bout du blizzard.

Translate review to English

Under Ether

Memorable

Reviewed in Canada on December 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

Beautiful writing. Haunting and sad. I enjoyed reading this book immensely.

See all reviews