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    Paint the Bird
    Paint the Bird
    Paint the Bird
    Ebook224 pages3 hours

    Paint the Bird

    By Georgeann Packard

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    The Reverend Sarah Obadias is broken, bitter and stripped of the reassurance of faith when she walks into a West Village restaurant in Manhattan. Here she encounters Abraham Darby, a rumpled but well-regarded painter who seduces the minister into his life of excess and emotional intensity. "I've run away from my life," Sarah tells him. "I know," Darby replies. "take mine." But for Sarah, each day with the artist will bring a new reality, or lack of it.

    Dancing through the novel is the mystical Yago, the gay son of Darby and the Costa Rican painter Alejandra Morales Diaz. But Alejandra's appearance further discomposes Sarah, and Yago provides no calm or clarity when she encounters him: "It's all bizarre, surreal. Finally she draws closer to Yago, intending to caress him in some horrible mix of mothering and lust."

    Bloodlines becomes squiggles and unreliable as the novel explores the ever-changing relationship between fathers and sons and what constitutes a family. And throughout, one question lingers: What really did happen when a small boy was swallowed by the sea?

    Laced with humor and a linguistic vibrancy, this tale of converging fates becomes a contemplation on faith, faithfulness, and the sticky, oft unpleasant and frightening nature of spiritual and emotional growth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Permanent Press
    Release dateJul 22, 2013
    ISBN9781579623173
    Paint the Bird
    Author

    Georgeann Packard

    Georgeann Packard is a writer and photographer who lives on Long Island's North Fork. She also designs, draws, and installs landscapes there. She created the photographs both on the cover and within her first novel, "Fall Asleep Forgetting." They are all time exposures of the coastal area, close up with the elements of rock, water, and sand in constant motion. These photographs mirror the emotional and spiritual transformations in the book's characters. Packard blends journal entries, poetry, and present tense narrative to tell this story of sexual identity, obsession, and a forced but peaceful coexistence.

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    Reviews for Paint the Bird

    3/5

    16 ratings10 reviews

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    • 2/5
      For all the colorful language and images the author creates, this seemed a somewhat disjointed, confused story that didn't really survive the test of time (didn't finish it). Sometimes fictional chaos is fun and liberating but sometimes it's just boring. An intriguing idea and nice presentation with the short poems preceding each chapter, but the chapters are sadly not worthy of them.
    • 2/5
      I received this book in exchange for an honest review. I had a very difficult time reading this book. Each chapter was almost a short story in itself. It was not done in a cohesive way. I was disappointed.
    • 2/5
      This might have made a tight short story, but as a novella, I found it a bit disappointing. An older female black minister has a crisis of faith and meets up with an artist mourning (in his own artist inspired way, of course) the death of his misunderstood gay son. We meet a few friends and family members. Not much else happens.
    • 2/5
      Sarah's life is in flux. She goes to a bar, she has a drink, someone buys her another. He is Abraham - strange coincidence and then life gets even stranger. They head to his place - what you expect happens. They are not kids. The next day he asks her to go somewhere with him, but he does not tell her where or why, but asks her to wear a dress that he has. She finds she is going to a funeral - his son's. After this all is tumultuous, crazy and full of new and different people all mourning the loss of this man's son.Readable but I found it confusing.
    • 3/5
      Ms Packard's language in this book is beautiful. She takes every sentence and paragraph and lays out a description that can be breathtaking. The problem is that I could not follow the flow of the book from paragraph to paragraph. There was no cohesion. I found myself having to reread, going back several pages and still feeling lost in the plot. I hope Ms Packard continues to write, since her skills with prose are remarkable but I hope she can develope more skill in her plotting. I am looking forward to her next book.
    • 3/5
      This is a delightfully strange book. You can hate it and like it at the same time.Upon finishing, I thought immediately that this is not really a novel. It is a great "elevator speech" to a good novel. (For thse of you who don't know the term, an "elevator speech" is a concise way of getting a selling point about yourself or your idea to someone else. Scenario: You want to work in a big firm and on the way to the elevator, you encounter the CEO of the company and you will both be on the elevator. How do you convince him you are good for the job you want? Or, you are in the elevator with a publisher. How do you convince him/her that your work should be published, all within the span of an elevator ride?)Georgeann Packard does, in my opinion, a fantastic job of putting characters together that would not normally encounter each other. She does make good use of the fact that New York City, Brooklyn and Long Island are the backdrops, so in a way, "anything goes."However, these unlikely characters needed a lot of fleshing out. They were a little empty. Which is sad, too, because a little more development of the characters would have made you care more about them.As it stands: older woman preacher meets older artist, they sleep together about an hour later, the next day they go to his gay son's wake (she, by the way, is now wearing his ex-wife's dress). Artist, Darby, did not have a good relationship with son or his son's partner but is tied to them by a sweetheart of a little boy they have adopted. Regrets about the son, Yago. Yago is dead but is also a ghost. Yeah, a ghost. Throw in a situation where artist Darby beats up a guy in a bar, which causes a bottle to be broken and scars his grandson's face (nothing serious) and another where the good reverend attacks a boy. Darby's ex-wife is a free spirit, who likes to sleep around with men and women.Like I said, elevator speech.Again, the characters need fleshing out. The story itself is good. In fact, it is so "out there", that it would work nicely. Sadly, this is a very good story that could have been a phenomenal story.I hate to say this but this is a good "first draft. Perhaps, her next work will include more detail into the lives of her characters.Ms. Packard, I will say this, I can see myself becoming a fan of your work as it develops. When GREAT execution comes to match your GREAT ideas, your work will be magnificent!
    • 3/5
      I can only say that it was disappointing to read a book that had so much potential and fell short.
    • 3/5
      The writing in this book, style wise, was beautiful. The way of structuring sentences was rather appealing and entertaining. My biggest problem with the book was following the flow of the storyline. The basic premise and the writing style was gorgeous but it was hard to follow the storyline because the storyline was done out in a way that honestly wasn’t that cohesive. A few times I had to pause in reading to make sure I knew exactly what was supposed to be going on. If the plotting out of where the chapters were put was done a little better then the book would have been more enjoyable.
    • 2/5
      We have an unlikely set of characters here. There is black woman reverend, a father, Darby, who has never dealt with his feelings towards his homosexual son, the son’s partner and the mother of the homosexual couple’s child. Reverend Sara is obviously a lost soul she is having a one night stand with the father. Oh, and also Yago the HIV infected dead son who is a ghost in the story. Sounds pretty strange don’t you think. It is weirdly interesting. An interplay of clashing ideals and values. Whose are right whose are wrong? Where is all this going?I kept wondering what message the author was trying to convey with this story. I am not sure even now what the point was. Alejandra is the mother of Yago. She tells Sara to “Put a bird there, be the bird. Soar above it all.” Alejandra is talking to Sara about the place in her dreams and how colorful it is. I think that she is talking about being yourself and letting go and making up who you want to be as you go along. That it is okay to be unique and be yourself. You are the bird. Paint the Bird is Yago’s story of who he is and the chapters are the colors that make up the bird. In each chapter we learn about the people in Yago’s life and they reveal pieces of Yago to us. Through out the book Darby learns who his son really was and becomes closer to his grandson and his son’s husband. He starts to bond with them.I have to say that I think that this is one of the strangest books that I have ever read. I almost didn’t finish it. I really don’t recommend this one. It is not really my kind of book. When I read I want to be entertained and escape reality. This book is not one that I would normally chose. I could not connect with it. This book is not for everyone. It contains homosexuality and some situations that might be disturbing for some people. I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.
    • 4/5
      When the Early Reviewer galley of Georgeann Packard’s novel Paint The Bird arrived, I quickly opened the package and read the jacket notes:“The Reverend Sarah Obadias is broken, bitter, and stripped of the reassurance of faith when she walks into a West Village restaurant in Manhattan. Here she encounters Abraham Darby, a rumpled but well-regarded painter who seduces the minister into his life of excess and emotional intensity.”--Paint The Bird, liner notes.Whoa! Not my kind of reading, I thought, but I opened the book thinking: A deal is a deal. A short poem by the author introduces the title of the book and then the reader meets Sarah: she is tall, black and beautiful, and is on the cusp of her 70th birthday. There’s more—she is having a crisis of faith, which she shared with the congregation of her church, and Sarah’s husband is having an affair with her best friend. Fortunately for Sarah, she didn’t share the latter with the congregation.The action in the novel quickly moves to the eatery mentioned in the liner notes where Sarah meets Abraham and they share confidences (he is having a crisis also). After dinner, they take a taxi to Abraham’s studio. It’s a one-night-stand, Sarah thinks, but Abraham has an unusual favor to ask… The short novel is fast paced and tightly written: there is sex, adventure and mystery as Sarah and Abraham wrestle with their fears and doubts, but no one is murdered or seriously harmed. I liked this unusual novel and was tempted to read it straight through, but common sense prevailed and I rationed it over three days to savor it longer.The production of the softbound galley draft by Permanent Press was gorgeous; nice dark print in readable Adobe Garamond as explained in the colophon by the author. Give this novel a read: If you are young, read it and find out what your grand parents are up to; if you are old, read it to see what problems your cohort is having; if you are really, really old (I’m 76), read it to remember! Carto

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    Paint the Bird - Georgeann Packard

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