The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

 It's the nature of small birds to sing their little hearts out. And it's the nature of God to hear them.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

The Nature of Small Birds is a quiet, gentle book, the kind of read that is a comfort and a respite. Susie Finbeiner has created a family that is not always perfect, but is able to love perfectly. 

It is the story of 'hippie' couple Bruce and Linda and their three daughters Sonny, Mindy, and Holly. Readers meet the couple in 2013, in Bruce's voice, and in 1975 narrated by Linda, and in 1988 through Sonny's eyes. Each narrative voice is distinct.

Central to their story is Mindy, who Bruce and Linda adopted through Operation Baby Lift at the end of the Vietnam War. We know what she experienced by her early fearfulness, and we understand the love that surrounded her by her growth and happiness. 

Over 3,000 Vietnamese babies and children were brought to America. Some were left at orphanages because their family was unable to care for them; the parents never approved their removal. 

Adopting a Vietnamese child in 1975 created strong reactions in friends and family and even strangers. The pain of losing sons in the war was still raw and visceral. Bruce had lost a brother in the war, and his mother had a difficult time accepting Mindy.

Now grown, Mindy is exploring how to find her birth mother in Vietnam, supported by her family.

If all I've done with this one life is to be a son, husband, brother, dad, grandpa to these remarkable people, that's good enough for me.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

My favorite voice was Bruce, whose reflections on life, family, and aging are beautiful. I also loved Linda's recollection of early motherhood, so like my own. Sonny's life in 1988, filled with malls and Cyndi Lauper and movies like 'Big', made me recall the world I knew when our son was born. 

The story is set in a Michigan 'Up North' setting, on the "pinkie knuckle" of Michigan.

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Nature of Small Birds

by Susie Finkbeiner

Revell 

paperback $15.99ISBN: 9780800739355

E-Book

ISBN: 9781493430468

Pub Date: July 6, 2021

from the publisher

In 1975, three thousand children were airlifted out of Saigon to be adopted into Western homes. When Mindy, one of those children, announces her plans to return to Vietnam to find her birth mother, her loving adopted family is suddenly thrown back to the events surrounding her unconventional arrival in their lives.

Though her father supports Mindy's desire to meet her family of origin, he struggles privately with an unsettling fear that he'll lose the daughter he's poured his heart into. Mindy's mother undergoes the emotional rollercoaster inherent in the adoption of a child from a war-torn country, discovering the joy hidden amid the difficulties. And Mindy's sister helps her sort through relics that whisper of the effect the trauma of war has had on their family--but also speak of the beauty of overcoming.

Told through three strong voices in three compelling timelines, The Nature of Small Birds is a hopeful story that explores the meaning of family far beyond genetic code.

About the author

Susie Finkbeiner is the CBA bestselling author of All Manner of Things, which was selected as a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, and Stories That Bind Us, as well as A Cup of Dust, A Trail of Crumbs, and A Song of Home. She serves on the Fiction Readers Summit planning committee, volunteers her time at Ada Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and speaks at retreats and women's events across the country. Susie and her husband have three children and live in West Michigan.

Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Maurer

Michael P. Maurer survived the Vietnam War. He needed to give a voice to the men who died. He worked on his novel for a dozen years and when it was published he donated the royalties to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

I was afraid of Perfume River Nights, afraid to know the drudgery and fear, the earnest naivety, the dark passions of war. But what better time to read it than for Memorial Day?

***

As a girl, I wrote in my diary that the boys were talking about the Vietnam War and fear of the draft. I felt bad, knowing my safety, and thought it unfair.

I didn't understand that war. I had not studied any war but the Revolutionary War; the teachers never seemed to get have time for the Civil War and certainly not the wars of the 20th c. The war movies I had seen, like The Bridge on the River Kwai, reinforced the wasteful stupidity of war.

Like most of my cohorts, I was anti-war. At sixteen, I wrote anti-war poetry. Such arrogance! What did I know to speak for veterans?

my poem in the school newspaper

A neighbor was drafted. Mom wrote him letters. He came home and told Mom he couldn't understand the way soldiers had treated the women. He had two sisters. In my innocence, I didn't understand then what he meant.

At college, young men were returning from Vietnam to complete their disrupted education. One man, who had been non-infantry, told how he learned never to wake his vet brother because his first instinct was to kill. I listened to his stories but did not suspect the unspoken.

***

Maurer's novel follows Singer, an earnest eighteen-year-old with patriotic dreams of glory. He bonds with the men and is eager to learn from them. When they are deployed he hears crying and wonders, Can it really be that bad?

Yes. It is that bad.

When he sees an unarmed enemy he doesn't shoot. The hate comes after his friends are killed.

Readers understand the physical, mental, and spiritual toil war exacts on Singer. We feel the desperation, the dirt in our face making its way into our nose and throat. We feel the paranoiac fear of the unseen enemy. The anger and hate.

And the profound guilt that accompanies the desire for revenge, the self-questioning when we know we have been inalteringly changed into someone we no longer recognize.

He had been innocent and naive then, younger and less angry. Now he was angry all the time. Angry at the deaths, the stupidity of it all, and at incompetent leaders who saw their men as pawns toward obtaining body counts and their next promotion, Angry at the things he'd done and at the knowledge that he would do more.~from Perfume River Nights by Michael P. Maurer

Singer realizes that the enemy likely felt the same way. Soldiers were all pawns in a game in which nothing seemed to be truly gained.

Singer grieves for the men who died and also for the boy he had been, the loss of his goodness and values. Revenge was just another lie.

He makes a choice, a crazy choice, but one that will save him.

***

My dad was to go to Korea until Mom became pregnant with me. I asked him about it once, and he said he would have gone to war. But I could never imagine it. Dad, who went hunting and never shot a deer. Dad who went fishing and threw the fish back into the lake. Dad who during WWII raised rabbits and then couldn't kill them for food. Dad, the soft touch. There were no war stories from my family, the last soldier having served in the Civil War. I can't imagine Dad killing a human being.

And yet, there is the story he told of first meeting my mother's grandparents when they were dating. My great-grandmother had tasked my grandfather with killing a litter of kittens. He asked my dad to do it. It shook dad. I supposed he did it because he never told a story about setting them free. Is there a killer in all of us, just waiting for instructions?

One man I know did have a war story to tell. Floyd Erickson, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and a skier, volunteered for the 10th Mountain Division during WWII. (read about them in The Winter Army.) He was on the side of a mountain in Italy when his best friend died. He prayed to God, asking to be spared. In return, he would change his life. Floyd survived, and as his wife often said, he did change his life. His church and his God and his family were the bedrock of his life. Last I knew, he still could fit into his uniform.

When he was a kid our son watched To Hell and Back with Audie Murphy on tv and his obsession shifted from dinosaurs to WWII. He spent years reading everything he could, became an expert on aircraft and tanks, expanding his interest into other 20th c wars. At school a boy teased that he like war. No, our son replied. He hated war. He read about war because it was the scariest thing he knew, just like dinosaurs and big trucks had fascinated him earlier in his life.

And so I read about war, too. Because it is the most awful I can imagine. In the comfort of my home, even in lockdown during a pandemic, I am safe and protected. I want to understand what I have not experienced.

***

Perfume River Nights took me on the transformative journey of one eighteen-year-old soldier. It made me better understand what I don't know. I won't soon forget these characters.

Michael P. Maurer is a Twitter friend through David Abram's Sunday Sentence on Twitter. Learn more about Maurer at
http://www.michaelpmaurer.com/about.html
Read about Maurer and the novel at
https://www.twincities.com/2016/07/01/perfume-river-nights-michael-maurer/

I purchased the book.

Perfume River Nights
by Michael P. Maurer
North Star Press
Published June 2016
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-68201-022-8

The Fourteenth of September by Rita Dragonette

The Fourteenth of September by Rita Dragonette is rooted in Dragonette's personal experience in 1969 and 1970 when daily body counts from Vietnam and the looming Draft Lottery was met by youth anti-war protests, culminating in the horror of the Kent State massacre.

The protagonist is a young woman on a WRAIN scholarship to become an army nurse, her meal ticket out of her dead-end town. But Judy decides she must understand the war and her values first by becoming involved with the campus Freaks in the anti-war movement.

circa 1968-9 art by teenage me

For Boomers like me, the novel covers familiar territory, rife with personal associations, from the long hair and the rock music to the political and social events.

The approach is fresh--the story of a young woman grappling with her future, her attitude toward the Vietnam War, pushing herself to determine what she believes.

May 7 student protest against the escalation of war and Kent State
in the Herald, Kimball  student newspaper

I got Judy's motivation.

In 1969 as a high school junior, I wrote anti-war poetry for the school paper but dated a boy in the Civil Air Patrol, the armed service in his future. He needed the structure and discipline CAP offered him, his home life dysfunctional.

1969 Herald with my poem

In 1970 at a small college campus divided into Greeks, Freaks, and GDIs (God Damed Independents) I found myself friends with a Freak with long hair and long fringed coats, kids who smoked pot, clean-cut Vietnam Vets returned to finish their education, long-haired Vietnam Viets with jaded stories, Sorority girls, and everyone in between. I wanted to know all kinds of people, to be nonjudgmental, but stay true to my values.

But Judy was grappling with more than me; I knew I would not be drafted, while I knew the boys were worried. I felt guilty. But I was 'safe.'

The post-war generation was not the first or the last to question the judgment and decisions of those in authority. Each generation must find their moral compass, and chose how to respond. Today's young heroes stand up for gun control and women's rights and inclusion.

Kimball High School, Royal Oak MI newspaper photograph
of October 15, 1969 Moratorium demonstration in Memorial Park

I asked Dragonette questions about her motivation for writing the novel, if it was cathartic to have written the events in fiction, and how her story relates to the current youth-led protests.

I lived through many of the incidents of the time period and, probably because I was always the participant-observer writer, I knew that there were things that happened that absolutely had to be recorded and remembered. I waited years to see if they would be by other novelists, but no. 

I had a friend (he's on my acknowledgments page) who sent me a letter after graduation telling me that there was a story to be told and I was the one to tell it.  Well, if you tell someone like me--who is ridiculously responsible something like THAT---it's quite the monkey on your back.

I've always been very interested in the role of women in war. My mother was a nurse in WWII who did really amazing things (i.e. she was in Patton's Army doing meatball surgery on the front in a tent, helping to liberate Stalag 11 in Germany) and saw far more action than my father, but was undervalued because she was "only a nurse," versus my father whose life was on the line.

When I heard the stories they didn't make sense. I had two parents, both of whom were doing something equally patriotic, important, and dangerous, and it didn't seem logical to value their specific experiences differently.

When it came to the war of my generation I saw the same issues--[women told that] you can't possibly understand what we men are going through-- and I wanted to present a case to make it clear that we are in wars as a generation, a country---not as a gender.

I wanted to pose a female dilemma that was every bit as fraught and intense as the decision that had to be faced by the men of the time (1969-70).

There are two articles in the Featured Articles section of the Media tab in my web site that also talk about this at www.ritadragonette.com. Specifically, there is a highly-fictionalized version of an actual incident in the book where a vet is dissed in an anti-war meeting. I remember that, and how I felt that someone needed to stop it but it couldn't be me because I was a girl and no one would listen to me. It was the only time in my life I ever felt like a coward---and yes, writing about it--and the whole book--was cathartic--did help me understand it better as an adult and dissect the impulse.  I never let myself feel that way again.

I think we write--which is arduous  and why would we choose to do that?--because we have stories that must be told to bear witness, to instruct. When we write we share our personal experience and point of view on an issue we feel is significant and not yet explored.

It's not therapy (though I'm sure that helps), but it gives value to experience and feelings. I feel that we learn our history from facts and nonfiction but we understand it through narrative.

My story is based on some of the things that happened in my life and some of it was easier to write about than other parts. The mother scenes were excruciating. She wasn't exactly my mother, but any time you write about a parent real life comes through. I still cry over the fate of certain characters--one was real and another was made up whole-cloth.

I also don't feel this time in history has been sufficiently covered. Vietnam is the Voldemort of wars--we feel bad because we lost, there were atrocities, we treated our vets badly. So we don't teach or talk about it. But there are important lessons to be learned.

Thank God for the time frame (it's been 50 years), Ken Burns, and the availability of unclassified information. Now we can look at it dispassionately, more like WWII.

I'm glad that part of the legacy of Vietnam is that we've been extra cautious about getting involved in other conflicts (not totally, but we don't rush in to save the world) and so far there has never been a draft; we've learned that we owe vets the world, etc.

WRAIN was like ROTC but I'm not sure the guys had to enlist before graduation; WRAIN members did. They were told it was an unbreakable commitment unless they got pregnant. Part of the absurdity is that you see it really wasn't. Later I found out more than a few guys got out of ROTC. I also learned that you could get out of WRAIN if you just told them you didn't want to be a nurse--they didn't want to be shafted for all that tuition without payback. Lots of Catch 22 stuff still goes on in the military but Judy took it seriously, her dilemma is dead serious--she believed more than they did. Just like the war. Just like young people do and should. What's the parallel?  Guys were drafted and went because they were told they had too. Yet many bought their way out...

See my MS. magazine story (click here to read) about how the activists of my time were similar to the Parkland kids. It says it all. Social media beats the streets. Our issue was the war--there was death (no draft means no marches), and civil rights, early feminism. I love how [today's young adults] care about climate change (we could barely get Earth Day going in l970), LGBT, etc. As far as women's rights--it's an ongoing battle. We should go to war over men trying to control women's bodies--we are re-litigating issues settled long ago. It's the hamster wheel of history. We need to go forward not backward.

Progress is hard-won but fragile. If that's true, we are doomed to the hamster wheel of history and we're capable of more than that. We can STILL change the world.

Rita Dragonette

*****

The novel has won six awards including the National Indie Excellence Award for new fiction and book cover design.

Visit Dragonette's website to learn more about The Fourteenth of September. You will find excerpts, the song playlist, the trailer, an more.

I received a free book through a giveaway on the Facebook group American Historical Novels. My review is unbiased.

The Fourteenth of September (Paperback)
By Rita Dragonette
She Writes Press
ISBN: 9781631524530
Publication Date: September 18, 2018
Paperback $16.95, Kindle $8.69

*****

Further Reading:
Read my review of 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence
by Howard Means here
The Given World by Maria Palaia tells about a woman whose brother is MIA in Vietnam, my review here