Birds Don’t Cry by Sandy Day

Written by Natasha Lowery
Reading time: 5 minutes

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Birds Don’t Cry by Sandy Day tells the story of a family, thrown into disarray as the death of their grandmother calls into question the future of the family inn/bnb. What emerges is a series of miscommunications, manipulations and long-forgotten memories that plague the relationships among the family members (both nuclear and extended).

Several months ago, I was able to read, and review Day’s novel Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. In that story, I felt Day had struggled to define her characters, instead leaning heavily on environmental descriptions to carry the story (you can read the review on winter’s bloom). In Birds Don’t Cry Day has reached a happy medium: the characters in Birds Don’t Cry (including Red, Kaffy, Sylvia and Maxine) each have an underlying motivation that comes through at various levels of consciousness. These underlying goals further impact their abilities to relate with each other.

Though Day was able to create much more relatable characters in Birds Don’t Cry, there remained a certain clunkiness in the ways her protagonists moved throughout their own story. The story touched on sibling rivalries, sexual assault, mental health, and theft to name a few themes, but the reader was pulled through these concepts so quickly that there is not much time to process and understand the characters’ development of (and through) these topics. It felt almost as if Day was over-eager to deliver the punchline, the supposedly satisfying end to her story. The only problem is that often, means are more enticing than the ends.

Overall, Birds Don’t Cry by Sandy Day is a short look into the inner workings of a particular family, unmoored by the grandmother’s death. The characters themselves have potential though were done a slight disservice by the pacing of the narrative.

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Featured Photo by Sandy Day