Parakeet (Bertino) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
What is Parakeet about? It’s about an ambivalent bride. It’s about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, bad mothers, womanhood, monogamy and the nature of time itself. It’s about being a woman trapped by her subconscious and social conventions. It's a Homeric quest to reclaim control over the heroine's own life and sanity…. Deeply funny… disquieting and darkly comic and vulnerable and true…. Bertino's writing is lyrical and sharp.
Bess Kalb - New York Times Book Review


[A] dreamlike, sardonic novel about a woman questioning her impending marriage…. The bride’s conflicted emotions come to a head as the novel builds to a satisfying end. Fans of Rivka Galchen will delight in Bertino’s subtly fantastical tale.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Bertino skillfully weaves together reality and flights of fancy as she tackles a wide variety of issues women face and the different ways to navigate these issues. An amusing yet instructive work about how personal perspective can change everything; highly recommended.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered from humdrum reality . . . Bertino playfully, precisely builds a big world in these pages, somehow making the case that there's too much love, pain, and magic to ever fit in one story, and fitting it in all the same.
Booklist


(Starred review) Self-assured, strange, and winning…. The book’s linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino’s images demand a lot of the reader…. A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope.
Kirkus Reviews