Review of ALL THE LITTLE BIRD-HEARTS by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (New Release)

 4 Stars

This book came to my attention when it was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.  With its unique perspective, it made for a good read.

It is 1988 in England’s Lake District.  Sunday Forrester is a neurodivergent single mother living with her 16-year-old daughter Dolly.  She works in the plant nursery owned by her former in-laws.  Sunday and Dolly’s lives are upturned when Vita and Rollo rent the house next door.  Sunday has difficulty with social interactions but is happy in her encounters with Vita because she seems to accept Sunday as she is.  And Dolly, an impressionable teenager, is attracted to the excitement and glamour of Vita and Rollo’s lives, qualities not found in her staid life with her mother.  But all is not as it seems.

Though an official diagnosis is not given, Sunday, the narrator, seems to be on the autism spectrum.  She is a creature of habit; change really disturbs her so she strives for a life of consistent routine.  I loved her comment that “[Dolly] is all that I have loved more than adherence to my routines.”  She also tries to avoid sensory overload:  “I was born with this intolerance of noise and light, and an accompanying greed for touch and smell” so “I want my choices narrowed so that they do not become overwhelming.”

Sunday is very self-aware.  She knows how her behaviour is different and considered odd:  “Facial expressions typically tell me nothing more than what is said” and “it takes time and considerable effort for me to adjust my conversation or focus” and “I naturally speak in a monotone.”  To help herself in social situations, Sunday has virtually memorized an etiquette book from the 1950s. 

With her exuberant personality, the exotic, free-spirited Vita is Sunday’s foil.  Vita is glamourous, confident, and unpredictable, all things that Sunday is not.  Like almost everyone, Sunday is dazzled and captivated by Vita.  But Vita, lacking the ability to understand people’s motives and intentions, is an unreliable narrator, as she admits:  “the details I am drawn to are often secondary, and these often mislead.”  As a result, Sunday’s descriptions of Vita mean something different to the reader.  Statements like “[Vita] seemed entirely without curiosity or concern” and her having “a profound lack of interest in pleasing people” though she “had an unimaginable desire for company” and “needed constant attention” suggest that Vita is a narcissist.  And only later does Sunday see that Vita is manipulative:  “I had not properly understood, then, that people could be played like instruments to produce whatever sound you demanded of them.” 

As soon as Vita appears, I experienced a sense of unease which grew into a sense of foreboding.  Vita is so self-absorbed and has such a sense of entitlement that it seems she must have a hidden agenda, especially once she starts paying particular attention to Dolly.  Knowing that her daughter is so important in Sunday’s life, I could only fear Vita’s intentions.  I suspected she would have no difficulty blithely taking anything belonging to someone else if she wanted it.

This growing menace is emphasized by Sunday’s foreshadowing.  She is narrating her story from the future looking back at the summer of 1988 so she often makes comments like she would still like to hear Vita’s posh accent, “even at the very end” and “Vita was extravagant and theatrical in all her expressions, and I appreciated that then.”  Sunday hints that she came to realize that Vita’s “appearance of naturalness was, in fact, a construct.”   Even Rollo is described as “solid and sweet as he seemed then.”

I loved seeing Sunday’s growth.  She comes to see Vita as shallow and self-centred.  For so much of her life, Sunday has suppressed her natural reactions to appear more “normal” but at the end she no longer holds on “to the compulsions and tics inside; these must be expressed to become feelings. . . . I no longer resist the urges to tap, to touch, or to wave my hands, . . . but allow them instead to travel through me uninterrupted.”  And she knows that though she may have difficulty expressing her feelings, she feels more deeply than those with little bird-hearts (like Vita, Sunday’s ex-husband, and Dolly’s paternal grandparents) who are capable of only a “superficiality of feeling.”  Her love for Dolly is a “solitary devotion without asking for reciprocation.”  She concludes, “my love for her remains constant; it is as fat as a beloved pet and receives the same frequent attention.  It is more, certainly, than conjuring polite and pleasing lies for onlookers.”  Vita is all artifice but Sunday is a genuinely loving person. 

One element that bothered me is the repetition.  The weekly dinners with Vita and Rollo follow a pattern.  Sunday’s repeated references to Sicilian folk tales and constant phonetic pronunciations mimicking Vita’s accent become tedious.  Yet this repetition is appropriate to the narrator who finds comfort in it.  The reader’s impatience actually reflects the impatience Sunday would see regularly in people who thought her strange. 

The book is not action-packed or fast paced.  But I found it engaging.  And it feels authentic in its depiction of the thought processes of someone on the autism spectrum.  For me, the novel was a quiet but compelling read.

Note:  I received an eARC from the publisher.