The Language of Birds

PreS-Gr 3–This touching story of outsiders offers loving reassurance to anyone who has ever felt lonely or unsure of their place in the world. Young Mira has always had a special relationship with birds. It’s humans, with their shifting expressions and contradictory behavior, that she finds difficult to understand. Isolated from her classmates, she spends her time feeding an amicable crow. Jad, the new boy at school who is always painting and drawing trees, catches her eye—she senses that, like her, he is different—but she can hardly work up the nerve to speak with him. The two begin a friendship after Mira gathers her courage and announces her presence by adding birds to Jad’s expansive forest, rendered in chalk art. From a final wordless spread of the two children sitting side-by-side under a spreading tree atop a little hill, it’s clear that they are kindred spirits. Early in the book, a young Mira keeps a level head when the cat brings a little yellow bird into the house, and she alone is able to catch, soothe, and release it. From then on, she is typically clothed in yellow or haloed in a warm yellow light, as if marked by the early experience. Jad, by contrast, wears a turquoise hoodie, the color of blue spruce. The two are in complete harmony with Manbeck’s soothing earth-toned palette with a backdrop of rich browns and deep greens—fitting for a story that celebrates an enduring connection with nature. Lappano’s sensitive, finely crafted, and poetic text renders Mira’s emotions palpably on the page with delicate avian symbolism.