Yellow Birds: A Novel

by Karen Green

Overview

Set just before the digital revolution, Kait is a young woman searching for identity and community among the cast-outs, cast-offs, and other “misfit toys” who refer to themselves as the Yellow Birds and follow a band called the Open Road from town to town.

Just as Kait believes she has found her place among a group of Birds travelling together in a messy van, a young man with the eye-roll worthy name of Horizon sits beside her one night and alters her fragile plan for the foreseeable future.

Amidst the whirlwind of the Open Road Tour, their growing feelings for one another soar to ecstatic heights, while propelling them toward an impending reckoning with their troubled pasts.

Filled with sex, drugs, music, and even cults, readers won't be able to get enough of this bohemian love story, the groupie lifestyle, and the party within the party.

“Yellow Birds will catch hold of your heart and not let go. Vivid, compelling, and poignant. Green is an exceptional talent.” —Rebecca Keenan, Journalist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781998206148
Publisher:	re:books
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Pages:	170
Sales rank:	667,202
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Karen Green is a successfully published writer who has had her poetry, essays, and fiction featured in Room Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Globe and Mail, and more. She has also contributed to Juno-winning and platinum-selling albums during her tenure as a senior copywriter. She is the author of two young reader books (Fisher Price).

Editorial Reviews

I love how much I could relate to the desire to run away with this bohemian bunch.” —Maie Pauts, On-Air Personality, Boom 97.3 Radio

“Yellow Birds is about a time in a woman's life where she leaves the family she was born into and the various families she creates as she finds herself. Whether or not you were a music festival fan, you'll relate to Kait. This novel will make you want to throw on a record and maybe call your mom. Maybe.” —Sarah Foster, Communications Professional & Blogger

“Yellow Birds is one of those novels that readers like me know they can't open at just any time, because once you start, everything else in your life gets put on hold. Grab a blanket, be it to curl up on the couch or to lay out on the beach, and sink in to this coming-of-age adventure.” —Angella Dykstra via Goodreads

“Green's words flow like the lyrics of a song. And just like a song that makes you want to hit repeat, this story and its characters will take you back to the yet-to-be discovered version of you that was trying to find its own anthem.” —Louise Gleeson, Psychotherapist and Professional Speaker

From the Publisher

★ 2024-03-27
A young Canadian woman following a touring rock band in the mid-1990s finds acceptance, love, heartache, and, ultimately, herself in Green’s novel.

Kait is one of the self-proclaimed Yellow Birds, fans who track their favorite band, Open Road, from city to city. (New to the Birds and their hippie lifestyle, she proudly spells her newly chosen name with an i.) Kait initially follows Open Road with friends, but they go home after a few days, and she continues on with some newly met Birds on the band’s West Coast tour, a thousand miles from her home. One night in Eugene, Oregon, while smoking a communal joint, she meets the “spectacularly hot” Horizon Evans. They become a couple, and she loves sitting in “the girlfriend seat” next to him in his car. “Every new discovery we made about each other seemed like one note following another, building towards a melody that became the prettiest song I ever heard,” she observes. They share their secrets—how Kait got the long scar on her arm, the fact that her mom is a hoarder, the story of Horizon’s last girlfriend’s descent into drug use—but a secret they learn together is life altering for them both. Green expertly captures the mood and spirit of a traveling community who “relied on itself, and the people within the community, for everything.” Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Sixwill eagerly devour this account of love, sex, emotional intimacy, and music. Green’s pacing is good, and her descriptions are vivid. But it’s her insights that can be truly delicious, such as when she describes the perfect spot for a person to place their hand on another’s back: “In the small of your back—when a hand is there, it means there is affection, familiarity. You can judge a relationship by noticing the very simple act of where one person’s hand rests on another person’s back.”

A long, strange trip, beautifully told.

Kirkus Reviews