The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor: A Life

(Hardback)

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Age range 5 to 9

'I intend to stand firm and let the peacocks multiply, for I am sure that, in the end, the last word will be theirs.'- Flannery O'Connor.

When she was young, the writer Flannery O'Connor was captivated by the chickens in her yard. She'd watch their wings flap, their beaks peck, and their eyes glint. At age six, her life was forever changed when she and a chicken she had been training to walk forwards and backwards were featured in the Pathe News, and she realized that people want to see what is odd and strange in life. But while she loved birds of all varieties and kept several species around the house, it was the peacocks that came to dominate her life. Written by Amy Alznauer with devotional attention to all things odd and illustrated in radiant paint by Ping Zhu, The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor explores the beginnings of one author's lifelong obsession.

Reviews

This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery OConnors childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness. With its memorable opening line, Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens, the book celebrates her fascination with lifes peculiaritiesand death. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhus illustrations align with the books focus on eccentricity...The thoughtful designat 12 inches square, as outsized as its subjectincludes a type chosen because its designer, like OConnor, had a love for drawing birds. A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision. Kirkus Reviews
Like the best childrens books, Alznauers words recognize the cleverness of their audience; they never condescend or talk down. Zhus work reminds us that illustrations shouldnt flatten the world either. Fluent in the grammar of both abstract and representational art, her work is full of dimension and color, symmetry and asymmetry, life and breath. The Strange Birds of Flannery OConnor holds potential enough to inspire its youngest readers, and to stoke the smoldering embers of curiosity in its oldest. Plough
Like OConnor, this gangly art object of a book tracing her first forays as a writer to an outsize fascination with the chickens in her childhood backyard is a strange bird, in the most wondrous of ways. There was something about strangeness, a young OConnor realized after her trained bantam drew fame, that made people sit up and look. Alznauer pairs a grounded, authentic vernacular with a lyricism that takes flight, while Zhus depiction of odd human proportions against brilliant brushstroke plumage stuns. -The New York Times
"In pitch-perfect harmony, writer Amy Alznauer and artist Ping Zhu honor the life of the prominent Georgia author and her affinity for the feathered species. Zhus painted scenes wow the eyes with dazzling color, fiddling marvelously with perspective and filling super-large, thick-stock pages. By studying something closely, such as the chickens and peacocks on her Milledgeville farm, OConnor could always find some hidden strangeness, making it beautiful and funny and sad all at the same time. (Which could also describe her fiction.) This nuanced and multilayered effort includes extra biographical material. For art lovers." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Amy Alznauer traces the writers gothic style to her Catholic childhood in Georgia...As Ms. Alznauer writes: In that brief moment of fame, Flannery had a revelation. People didnt want to see any old chicken; they wanted a weird one. There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look.Theres a responsive touch of weirdness in Ping Zhus artwork for this lovely book, with its glowing colors, bold shapes, and proportions that shift between realistic and outlandish. The bright plumage in a final soaring image suggests what a strange bird OConnor was herself." -The Wall Street Journal

Author Bio

Amy Alznauer lives in Chicago with her husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks, and a part-time fish, but, as of today, no elephants or peacocks. Check back.
Her writing has won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Christopher Award, and the SCBWI-Illinois Laura Crawford Memorial Mentorship, and her essays and poetry have appeared in collections and literary journals including The Bellingham Review, Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth.
She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches calculus and number theory classes at Northwestern University. She is the managing editor for the SCBWI-IL Prairie Wind. And she is the writer-in-residence at St. Gregory the Great, where she has a little office in a big building with a bad internet connection, so she actually gets some work done (in theory).
Ping Zhu is a freelance illustrator who has worked with clients big and small, won some awards based on the work she did for aforementioned clients, attracted new clients with shiny awards, and is hoping to maintain her livelihood in Brooklyn by repeating that cycle.