Imperfect Birds
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Susan Denaker
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By:
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Anne Lamott
About this listen
A powerful and redemptive novel of love and family, from the author of the best-selling Blue Shoe, Grace (Eventually), and Operating Instructions.
Rosie Ferguson is 17 and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent (she aced AP physics), athletic (a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion), and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family's move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn't been as bumpy as Elizabeth feared.
But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them - and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.
This is Anne Lamott's most honest and heartrending novel yet, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.
©2010 Anne Lamott (P)2010 PenguinListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Raw and sensual, Anne Lamott’s Imperfect Birds is almost a novel-length poem. With language so descriptive of sound, texture, and scent, the listener is transported to the Northern California town where Elizabeth and James are struggling to raise their teenage daughter Rosie.
Susan Denaker’s narration balances a “hippie” vibe with typical baby boomer nostalgia for the traditional, sensible world they rebelled against. Her voice shifts from cool, impartial observation to embody the “cluttered and numb” Elizabeth; the bemused, solid James; and Rosie in all her high school drama and indignation.
Through words and sound, Lamott and Denaker knit together a family of characters who are aching through their everyday world, looking around every corner for some major catastrophe to relieve them at least of the tension among them. The slow-moving catastrophe of the novel is Rosie’s drug use and Elizabeth’s inability to take control of the situation.
This central conflict seeps into all the other relationships in the novel, putting stress on Elizabeth and James’ marriage and leading Rosie down a dangerous path with a guy from school. There are moments when Elizabeth and Rosie connect, but daughter is trying so hard to break free from mother, that deception and hurtfulness become routine.
At the beginning of the novel, Elizabeth’s friend Rae tells her, “You stop pretending life is such fun or makes sense. It’s often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It’s unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people.” Imperfect Birds is the story of how one family holds onto that love through depression, addiction, and the sometimes painful experience of simply growing up. Sarah Evans Hogeboom
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Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.
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Probably buy the book too.
- By Soupergirl on 09-14-15
By: Marina Keegan
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All the Winters After
- A Novel
- By: Seré Prince Halverson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Kachemak Winkel never intended to come back to his hometown of Caboose, Alaska, where his family died in a plane crash 20 years earlier. When he finally musters the courage to return and face his painful memories, he's surprised to find a mysterious young woman living in his abandoned house.
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The Old Old Story
- By Bruce on 06-16-16
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Looking for Alaska
- By: John Green
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps”. Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
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I am concussed dot-dot-dot
- By Bren McKenna on 10-01-19
By: John Green
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This Raging Light
- By: Estelle Laure
- Narrated by: Sandy Rustin
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucille seems to have nothing going for her. With the bills piling in, the house falling apart around her, and her sister's growing distress, it is precisely the worst possible moment for Lucille to fall recklessly in love with her best friend's twin brother, Digby, who is practically engaged.
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Amazing Loving and Sexy
- By Princess Lucy on 12-28-17
By: Estelle Laure
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Tiger, Tiger
- A Memoir
- By: Margaux Fragoso
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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One summer day, Margaux Fragoso meets Peter Curran at the neighborhood swimming pool, and they begin to play. She is seven; he is 51. When Peter invites her and her mother to his house, the little girl finds a child’s paradise of exotic pets and an elaborate backyard garden. Her mother, beset by mental illness and overwhelmed by caring for Margaux, is grateful for the attention Peter lavishes on her, and he creates an imaginative universe for her, much as Lewis Carroll did for his real-life Alice.
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a weirdly loving diatribe against pervs.
- By Dane Flakeman on 05-21-11
By: Margaux Fragoso
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Still Missing
- By: Chevy Stevens
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old Realtor, had three goals: sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she’s about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.
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A singular voice; a horrendous story.
- By Richard Delman on 01-21-12
By: Chevy Stevens
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Marrow
- By: Tarryn Fisher
- Narrated by: Audra Pagano
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.
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HUH?? I'm so confused LOL
- By ❤️Cyndi Marie❤️🎧Audiobook Addicts🎧 on 09-15-16
By: Tarryn Fisher
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Kissing Games of the World
- By: Sandi Kahn Shelton
- Narrated by: Myra Platt
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What if the one person you can't bear to be with is also the one person you can't bear to be without? Jamie McClintock is a free-spirited artist and single mother who has at last found peace and freedom sharing a farmhouse with an elderly man and his young grandson. But when the old man dies suddenly her idyllic country life comes to a halt as the old man's estranged son, Nate, returns to claim the house and his child.
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Great Writer, Great Narrator ! Loved it!
- By Ms. Critic on 05-30-09
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She's Come Undone
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.
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Really disappointing narrator!
- By Jessica Williams on 01-21-12
By: Wally Lamb
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Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
- By: Juliann Garey
- Narrated by: Dan Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.
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Psychosis or Syphilis?
- By Vira on 04-02-13
By: Juliann Garey
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The Last Time We Say Goodbye
- By: Cynthia Hand
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The last time Lex was happy, it was before. When she had a family that was whole. A boyfriend she loved. Friends who didn't look at her like she might break down at any moment. Now she's just the girl whose brother killed himself. And it feels like that's all she'll ever be. As Lex starts to put her life back together, she tries to block out what happened the night Tyler died. But there's a secret she hasn't told anyone--a text Tyler sent that could have changed everything.
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Such sweet sorrow
- By Lesaly on 04-26-15
By: Cynthia Hand
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Future Home of the Living God
- A Novel
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backward, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
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“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”
- By Mel on 11-27-17
By: Louise Erdrich
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If I am Missing or Dead
- A Sister's Story of Love, Murder, and Liberation
- By: Janine Latus
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In April 2002, Janine Latus' youngest sister, Amy, wrote a note and taped it to the inside of her desk drawer. "Today Ron Ball and I are romantically involved", it read, "but I fear I have placed myself at risk in a variety of ways. Based on his criminal past, writing this out just seems like the smart thing to do. If I am missing or dead this obviously has not protected me...."
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All About Janine
- By Ellen on 07-02-07
By: Janine Latus
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Why oh why did she narrate this?!
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Don't Let Them Make Us Hate Them
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In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us grapple with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up - from climate crises to daily assaults on civility - how can we cope? Where, she asks, "do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back...with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?" We begin, Lamott says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity.
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Real Refreshing and good for the Soul
- By Jesse Rolfer on 03-05-21
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Hallelujah Anyway
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"Mercy is radical kindness", Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others - and yourself - to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves". It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere.
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Beautiful
- By Mandi on 04-04-17
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“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.” In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won't be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.
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Phenomenal
- By Anna Malone Cloitre on 05-13-24
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All New People
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Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents: a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming of age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real estate and technological developments that foreshadow a drastically different future.
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Why oh why did she narrate this?!
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Don't Let Them Make Us Hate Them
- By Carole T. on 10-16-18
By: Anne Lamott
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Help, Thanks, Wow
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Listeners of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new audiobook, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals. It is these three prayers - asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us - that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward.
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Great writer, not a great voice.
- By Kindle Customer on 08-22-20
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Traveling Mercies
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With an exuberant mix of passion, insight, and humor, Anne Lamott takes us on a journey through her often troubled past to illuminate her devout but quirky walk of faith. In a narrative spiced with stories and scripture, with diatribes, laughter, and tears, Lamott tells how, against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. She shows us the myriad ways in which this sustains and guides her, shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life and exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.
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So so good
- By Nathan on 09-21-20
By: Anne Lamott
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Hard Laughter
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Writer (and sometime house cleaner) Jennifer is 23 when her beloved father, Wallace, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. This catastrophic discovery sets off Anne Lamott's unexpectedly sweet and funny first novel, which is made dramatic not so much by Wallace's illness as by the emotional wake it sweeps under Jen and her brothers, self-contained Ben and feckless, lovable Randy. With characteristic affection and accuracy, Lamott sketches this offbeat family and their nearest and dearest as they draw ever closer.
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Disjointed and not humorous. No laughter here.
- By Ani on 06-20-24
By: Anne Lamott
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Stitches
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one other and to what’s sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Lamott’s profound follow-up to her New York Times - best-selling Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book Lamott explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age.
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Surprisingly, Ms. Lamott is weak as a narrator.
- By EC on 12-03-13
By: Anne Lamott
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Breathing Under Water
- Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
- By: Father Richard Rohr OFM, Anne Lamott - foreword
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We all suffer from unhealthy dependencies that we continually return to in hopes of having a better life. But after yet another TV show is streamed or another drink is swallowed, we find we once again feel worse, not better, than we did before. Where is the hope for that fully awakened life we long to live?
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NOT JUST FOE 12-STEPPERS!!!!!
- By Musical Theatre Fan on 04-16-23
By: Father Richard Rohr OFM, and others
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Crooked Little Heart
- A Novel
- By: Anne Lamott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Fergusons make their home in a small California town where life is supposed to resemble paradise, but for 13-year-old Rosie, reality is a bit harsher. Her mother, a recovering alcoholic, is still beset by grief over the early death of her first husband. Rosie's stepfather is a struggling writer plagued by doubts and hilarious paranoia. And Rosie, aching in the bloom of young womanhood and obsessed with tournament tennis, finds that her athletic gifts now place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers seems to be developing an obsession of his own.
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Not my favorite
- By Meg on 09-22-22
By: Anne Lamott
What listeners say about Imperfect Birds
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mrs Dumblepants
- 12-20-21
Nothing happens
I’m halfway through this book and nothing has happened. I love Anne Lamott so I do give her some leeway but this book is terrible.
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- T.L.
- 08-07-18
Teen Substance Abuse
This is a realistic depiction of substance abuse in teens. It is well written and humorous.
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Overall
- bobo
- 05-03-10
Very slow
Did not enjoy this at all - had to stop 3/4 of the way as it was dragging on.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Susan
- 05-01-10
Imperfect birds not quite perfect but good.
If they had had 3.5 stars I would have given the book that rating.
Imperfect birds came along right at the same time I was dealing with the same issue w/ my 26 year-old step-daughter so I was very well able to relate to it.
At the beginning of the book I felt lost. The story didn't seem to move forward - just focus on past events every two minutes. I literally felt like the book took one step forward, 2 steps back for the first couple of chapters. Additionally, and maybe I'm naive, but they already knew some of the drugs she was taking and the promiscuity and excused it! At the beginning I thought, "Well what is the story about - they already know exactly what she's doing." But it does actually get worse.
When the story did finally start moving, I found that James is the only character I liked. The girl's sense of entitlement infuriated me as did the mother's total denial of the situation. As the pattern of behavior I've experienced is the same, it is probably true to life.
It is an interesting book and a scary commentary on parents and teens today. Although I felt like it dragged in places, overall, i enjoyed it.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Eileen
- 05-10-10
Drag on, Drag On
The only reason I finished this "read" is that I had spent credits for it. The story drags on with too much detail and then ends abruptly.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Teresa
- 05-10-10
Disappointing
The story was all too predictable. Not sure what the message was besides don't believe everything your child tells you.
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Overall
- Mindy DiSalvo
- 06-15-11
This is probably the worst book I have read
I gaveit on star because I couldn't figure out how to give it -5!!!! This is probably the worst book I have read in 20 years. The writing is shallow and the topic of contemporary teenage issues was apparently very poorly researched thus presented in the story. Seems like the writer just wanted to write for shock value. The book is a waste of time, money, and effort.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Sara
- 04-30-10
Couldn't even get into it....
I was three hours into it and it was going no where so just had to stop! Weird mother daughter relationship and I just could not see it going any where interesting..
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4 people found this helpful
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- KatrinaD
- 10-22-16
A poignant and well crafted rendition of an intervention
This is another story of a dysfunctional family coping with addiction. Elizabeth is a recovering alcoholic, her husband James a struggling writer. Their daughter Rosie, a successful junior slides from casual experimentation with drugs to full-blown addiction. She quickly learns all the tricks: lame excuses, lies, and manipulations to fool her parents. Family life deteriorates rapidly but her parents remain clueless for months until they can't. This novel brings a sensitive and poetic perspective to a somewhat trite plot. Through the voices of Elizabeth and Rosie, the author brings depth and amusing or provoking insights to the difficult journey toward recovery. I enjoyed thoroughly the slow rhythm and detours of the narrative.
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2 people found this helpful