Though this promised to be a strange little book (and how I love strange little books!), in fact I think most of the good parts were just literary descriptions of Kusturica's films. Thence the strangeness. Without him, it reads to me like a satire of war that I have read before. It's not without merit, some striking language, phrasing, and plot... in fact I think I would like it more if I hadn't been distracted by that realization. I do wish people would accept that g*psy is an insulting term to the people to whom it's been applied, and adapt their usage accordingly. ( )

The Avian Gospels I and II
Adam Novy
Short Flight / Long Drive Books

Adam Novy's 'The Avian Gospels' is a novel that refuses to color in the lines. At no time while I was reading it could I say, this is literary fiction, dystopian fiction, political satire, myth, fable, fairy tale or love story. It is all these things and more and the whole is greater for it. The novel is set in a city that is suffering a plague of birds on a biblical scale and centered on a boy, Morgan, who can control them. Morgan and his father, who also has the power to control the birds, are opposed in their approaches to life under a regime, headed by Judge Giggs, which has all the worst elements of Stalinist Russia and monarchist France.

Somehow, miraculously, in two small volumes, Novy manages to examine otherness, self-identification, the destructive power of love as well as the madness that can come of making a myth, but not at the expense of characters who are wholly alive and realized. He tempers the bleakness with a wickedly dry humor and an ever increasing pace that makes the book hard to put down.
(buy both volumes, it really is just one story).

The novel is printed and bound to look like a hotel bible in red faux leather with a sparse pattern of birds on volume I that becomes almost a blot on the cover of volume II. The biblical look is carried through to the inside with line number and large font numbers for each chapter heading and gilt page edges and ribbon markers. I confess though, that I thought the books were so beautiful that I read the free e-book version that publisher sent me. Highly recommended ( )