Anna Joy Springer, The Birdwisher, Birds of Lace, 2009.
"The Birdwisher is a novella about a girl, a pigeon-detective and a murderous mystery. Written after Dashiell Hammet's Dead Yellow Woman, this debut book from Anna Joy Springer (Blatz, Cypher in the Snow, The Gr'ups, Sister Spit) is beautifully illustrated throughout by Sam McWilliams. Strange, grotesque, noir and rendered in gorgeous inventive prose, The Birdwisher is the first book from Birds of Lace."
"Last year I participated in the HTML Giant holiday gift exchange and Birds of Lace Press was my secret giftgiver, sending me among other things Anna Joy Springer’s The Birdwisher. Because I was focusing on my qualifying exams all year, I couldn’t crack it open… until now… The Birdwisher is a modest, zine-y novella, beautifully illustrated by artist Sam McWilliams. Big, clunky typeface, winkingly lo-fi production. It is a treasure. The subtitle is “a murder mystery for very old young adults,” and in her acknowledgments, Springer says she wrote the story “on top of” Dashiell Hammet’s Dead Yellow Woman.
The opening scene witnesses a young woman (“the virgin”) using rusty scissors to cut through her hymen. Then a bird flies into her window and dies. The rest of the story imagines what between these characters has led up to this moment, and so we are thrust into the charming and uncanny human-bird society that constitutes the world of the novella, in which Walker Geon, bird detective, has been hired by a young woman named Gwen to investigate the murder of six birds.
Mostly the murder mystery doesn’t matter; that is, it doesn’t matter who killed the birds, but it does matter why, and Walker’s investigation functions as an uneasy mask which eventually disintegrates to make visible a horrifying and perversely humorous parable of sexual assault out of which Walker emerges Gwen’s protector.
There’s an instability of narrative voice that claims a debt to Acker (on top of the Hammett), but above that there’s a humility to the book that doesn’t really care whether it’s read as avant-garde or a kinda chintzy YA mystery. It’s both, of course, and it’s really its own thing, excessive and defiant and vulnerable. The Birdwisher is a story with exposed throat and chest. Brave. Happy bird day." - Megan Milks
