By Amber McGee
Courier Staff Columnist
The 1920s, a period of time we now often think of as one big party. The war was over, a jazzy revolution was sweeping across the nation, prohibition was being ignored by millions, women were beginning to break out of their traditional roles, and the economy was doing better than ever.
For Garnet Richardson, life in the 1920s means being sent away from home to escape the Polio outbreak, to give her mother a chance to help her father return from the war, and to learn how to be a proper lady, to give up her passion for ornithology.
It’s the summer before her last year of highschool; she should be going on double dates and watching birds, not sitting in stifling heat stitching napkins. Even after being allowed to get a job Garnet still feels unsatisfied with her summer. Weeks have passed since her vacation started and still nothing exciting has happened.
Then one day a young woman walks into her life and changes all of that.
Isabelle is a whirlwind and everything Garnet wishes she could be. Bold and dramatic, a true to the word flapper. The two quickly strike up a strong friendship, but as happy as she is with that, Garnet soon realizes that she wants to be more. There’s only a few weeks left in her vacation and now she must decide what it is she truly wants to do.
Does she want to be the perfect housewife her mother wants her to be? Or will she go against her family’s wishes and continue studying ornithology in college?
Silhouette of a Sparrow is a sweet and simple read for a slow day. Instead of a full, detailed novel about Garnet’s growth throughout the summer readers are instead given what can best be described as a snapshot. How much time passes in chapters varies; some chapters cover only a few hours, others span over weeks. There’s not much of a plot other than “Girl meets girl, has internal crisis.” For this reason sometimes the story can drag, because when it seems like something bad is going to happen it doesn’t, or it gets mentioned in an aside in the following chapter.
This is one of the few times I can say that I’m glad a book wasn’t very long. That being said, I do wish there was a few more pages dedicated to the characters. Other than Garnet, whose point of view we’re reading from, and her cousin Hannah, the characters seemed a bit flat. Hints of depth were given only once everything was over. This didn’t make the characters any less enjoyable, just disappointing.
The strongest part of this book is Griffin’s descriptions of the setting and birds. It only makes sense that since Garnet is a bird lover the birds would get extra attention, but I was really impressed with how vivid the backgrounds were. There wasn’t long paragraphs dedicated to describing how the water looked, and yet I could easily imagine how it looked, and in some cases how things sounded.
Though a few of the plot points were predictable, and the ending was bittersweet, I found that this book was a nice change of pace from all the others I’ve read recently. Sure it wasn’t the best novel in the world, but how often can you say that you’ve read a book about lesbians in the 1920s? Maybe it was the fact this was a romantic coming of age story that takes place over summer, but this book reminded me of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the universe. Readers who liked that novel may enjoy this one as well.