A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence

This is the 4th book in a five-book series that Margaret Laurence wrote about the fictional Manitoba town of Manawaka (based on her hometown of Neepawa). It’s not a “series” in the sense that one normally thinks of a series; the books are only loosely connected–each one has a different main character–and so they really stand alone. There’s no need to read them in order or together.

The 5th book, The Diviners, was given to me as a gift when I was 14. I’d hung onto it and re-read it a few times over the years, and somewhere along the line, I decided I’d like to read the others, so I started picking them up when I saw them in used bookstores (this adds an element of chance to it that I find exciting. YMMV). A Bird in the House was the last of the five that I had yet to read. I found it a few weeks ago.

This is a book that I think I could re-read over and over again. It’s actually not a novel, but eight interconnected short stories. Which is interesting to me, because I’m working on a book like that. The stories center on the childhoood of a girl who grows up to be a writer, essentially depicting the process of how a child becomes a writer. I smirked to (at?) myself in amusement numerous times.

The other books in the series are: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, and The Fire-Dwellers.