Karen Green takes readers on a breezy summer fling of a book along with “Kait” who is trying on a new identity as part of the eponymous “Yellow Birds”. The Yellow Birds are the hangers-on who follow their favourite band across the states. Kids in tie-dye regalia, a mess of tanned limbs, a self-contained ‘society’ which directly channels Deadheads and The Grateful Dead spill over the pages, rife with drugs and superficial sex, sporting dirt and underarm hair as a badge of courage. If you are not one of the Tapers or Pilgrims or Shakers or Spinners or Twinkies (newbies to the culture) on the tour, you are merely a tourist.
Green takes us to the parking lots filled with a grab-bag of types, including the Pilgrims and Twinkies, down to where the dancing happens, into the vans where the co-sleeping happens. Between the parked cars where couples have sex while people walk by. It’s never quite clear where exactly people get the money to afford this permanent summer-camp for young adults… My own recollection of Deadhead kids in high school was that they were all extremely organized, capitalistic hawkers of tie-dye shirts and drugs.
Against the backdrop of the Tour, the plot meanders much like the noodle-y solos and improvisation the Grateful Dead were infamous for. The love story of Horizon and Kait, the actual story here, plays out amidst shifting friend groups and alliances. It reads light and fairly unchallenging, like a 90210 episode or one of those compact romance novellas that dominate the romance market. It is women’s fiction, chick-lit, built for comfort and speed.
One of Kait’s little victories is being “chosen” to sit up front next to her new guy in the “girlfriend seat”. Much of Kait’s life on the road is eaten up with jealousies and paranoias over being good enough, chosen enough to be in the girlfriend seat rather than exploring a world where she drives her own car, or bike, on the way to designing her own life… But this is an off-beat romance, so the girlfriend seat is a big step in Kait’s romance ladder. Girl meets boy. Will girl manage to balance insecurities to keep boy?
The road and the travellers on it is a timeless story structure. Green’s prose is clear and moves quickly. There is a tendency to relate plot via fairly vague sentences like “we opened up to each other more, trading stories about our upbringing, family, experiences on Tour” which left me wanting to get more specific detail. This telling, not showing, often reduces characters to the level of a charming Instagram snapshot. Well shot, well framed, and aesthetic, not necessarily deep. And that’s ok. The sights, sounds and smells of the tour itself are well drawn though and this light read is totally going to be some people’s cup of mushroom-laced, yarrow root tea.
I picked up the book mistaking the “tour” for a story about the dynamics of a band on their tour and was surprised to learn it was a sweet coming of age story. I anticipated finding out what the band the Yellow Birds were following was all about. What backstage antics might have been going on backstage? It could have made for a wild B plot.
Having grown up in some of the chaos of hippie culture myself, dirt, bugs, intoxicated parents and all, reading about the premeditated grime, cultish-ness, loose sex, and aimlessness was not a celebration for me – it was more of a PTSD trigger! For those who DO jones for a dose of wiggly-dancing and patchouli and skunk weed riding high on a summer breeze while young love figures out where to dance during the second set, grab this book. Yellow Birds is a light, beachy read, a road trip through golden summertime, confused youth and drop out counter-culture which leads to a quiet moment of growth.
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).
About the Reviewer
Emily A. Weedon is the CSA award–winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.
Book Details
Publisher : re:books
Publication date : March 5 2024
Language : English
Print length : 170 pages
ISBN-10 : 1998206149
ISBN-13 : 978-1998206148