Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

The Merit Birds

by Kelley Powell

If you’re looking for a book about understanding and acceptance, about a character developing a burgeoning sense of cross-cultural commonality, The Merit Birds by Ottawa author Kelley Powell is not it.

The Merit Birds (Kelley Powell) coverWhen his mother applies for an overseas placement resulting in their relocation to Laos, 18-year-old Cam is more than a little upset. An angry youth to start with, Cam’s mood is further worsened when he is torn away from his friends, school, and basketball team and must contend with the “Dark Ages” quality of life in Laos, its slow pace, and his inability to communicate.

Things don’t really get better for Cam in Laos. Sure, he meets a girl and develops a friendship, but when tragedy strikes, Cam’s situation becomes much worse than he could have imagined.

By moving away from the multicultural clichés and tropes one has come to expect from YA stranger-in-a-strange-land stories, Powell creates something unique – a story rooted in characters that are realistically, if unpleasantly, depicted. The slow revelation of the roots of Cam’s anger, and, more significantly, the effect that anger has on him when events spin out of his control, is powerful and memorable.

On a mechanical level, however, the writing doesn’t always attain the same heights. The use of adjectives is relentless and overpowering. A sentence such as “From the glassless windows of a bright blue-and-red tuk tuk I saw bald monks in carrot-coloured robes carrying black, oversized umbrellas to protect them from the vicious sun” draws attention away from the very objects and scenes it is attempting to describe.

Eventually, however, the prose loosens (or the reader becomes accustomed to it), and the narrative, which shifts between Cam and other characters, takes the foreground, to great effect.

 

Reviewer: Robert J. Wiersema

Publisher: Dundurn Press

DETAILS

Price: $14.99

Page Count: 240 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-45972-931-5

Released: May

Issue Date: April 2015

Categories: Children and YA Fiction

Age Range: 12-15