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Laura Kasischke

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White Bird in a Blizzard: A Novel Hardcover – January 13, 1999

by Laura Kasischke (Author)

270

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Laura Kasischke's first novel, SUSPICIOUS RIVER, was hailed as "extremely powerful" (The Los Angeles Times) and "amazing...beautifully written" (The Boston Globe). Now Kasischke follows up her auspicious debut with mesmerizing story of youthful passion and loss of innocence.

When Katrina Connors' mother walks out on her family, Kat is surprised but not shocked; the whole year she has been "becoming sixteen" - falling in love with the boy next door, shedding her babyfat, discovering sex - her mother has been slowly withdrawing. As Kat and her impassive father pick up the pieces of their daily lives, she finds herself curiously unaffected by her mother's absence. But in dreams that become too real to ignore, she's haunted by her mother's cries for help. Finally, she must act on her instinct that something violent and evil has occurred - a realization that brings Kat to a chilling discovery.

Like SUSPICIOUS RIVER, which The New Yorker described as "by turns terrifying and ravishingly lyrical," WHITE BIRD BLIZZARD evokes works of Kathryn Harrison and Joyce Carol Oates - and confirms Kasischke's arrival as a major literary talent.

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hyperion
Publication date

January 13, 1999
Dimensions

5.88 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0786863668
ISBN-13

978-0786863662
See all details

Laura Kasischke
27
Paperback
30 offers from $1.80

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four crucial years in a troubled teenager's life are the focus of this eloquently written, suspenseful second novel by the author of the praised Suspicious River. Having grown up in an extraordinarily suffocating atmosphere, 16-year-old Kat Connors greets her mother's disappearance one winter day with stoic calm. Kat is overweight, lives in a cookie-cutter suburb, feels her heavy figure makes her a social outcast?and yet has a pivotal adolescent sexual experience. Readers who find similarities between Kat and Delores Price, the heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, will also see eerie similarities in Kat's tense relationship with her mother (both mothers have birds as pets, in one case a parakeet, in the other a canary; the girls' fathers hate them; subsequently, both birds are found dead at the bottom of their cages). In both novels, mother and daughter end up sleeping with the same man without the daughter's knowledge. Like Delores, Kat sees a psychiatrist who becomes a father figure to her. Both heroines lose weight and triumph over their traumatic experiences, and each experiences the unexpected death of her mother. Despite these similarities, Kasischke's heroine is a fully rounded, distinctively portrayed character?a self-centered, typically hormone-crazed teenager who painstakingly develops into a self-aware young woman. Kasischke movingly charts her progress into a person, a young lady who learns to trust her instincts and her misgivings about the truth behind her mother's disappearance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

At the start of Kasischke's second novel (after Suspicious River, Houghton, 1996), 16-year-old Katrina Connor is struggling to come of age in suburban Ohio. Preoccupied with sex and dating and eager to separate from parents she sees as terminally boring, she largely ignores her mother's efforts to lure her into closeness. Then, on a frigid January day, her mother vanishes. Sure, she had often complained about the dullness of marriage. But don't all full-time homemakers long for more, Katrina wonders? Why would she simply take off, without a trace? As the truth of Evie Connor's disappearance emerges, the reader is treated to a cacophony of raw teenage emotion. Shadowy dreams in which a beguiling Evie appears to Katrina enhance Kasischke's mysterious but always poetic prose. The soft, almost ethereal language makes the horrifying reality at the core of the book shockingly powerful, the hidden underside of a quintessentially normal domestic tableau. Highly recommended.?Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Poet Kasischkes second novel (after Suspicious River, 1996) is a mix of the fine and the irritating that glides slowly downward to an airy nothing. Life in suburban Garden Heights, Ohio, becomes at once more exciting and more miserable for teenaged Katrina Connors when she falls in love with classmate and next-door neighbor Phil: the new-found sex is wonderful, but Katrinas already exceeding-strange mother gets suddenly all the more antagonistic, cruel, and unpredictableand then disappears entirely, never to be heard from again except for one phone call (or so Kat believes) declaring shell never come home again. Good riddance, many a reader will say, to this woman who through boredom, sexual unhappiness, ingrained habit, pure spite, and unmitigated meanness routinely derided her admittedly dull-witted husband (a school administrator named Brock) and did no better by her daughter, choosing her name because She wanted a cat, overfondling her in childhood, then manically humiliating her in teenhood when Phil comes on the scene. Nevertheless, Moms disappearance triggers a sense of enormous emptiness in Kat (there are no adjectives for this lightness I feel, this whiteness) that gets labeled anxiety disorder, parallels suburban Ohios emptiness itself, and takes her to a psychoanalyst, wherewell, where the books trouble begins, seeming uncertain where to go next. A year will pass, two, then three; Kat starts college; Phil and Kat break up; we meet eccentric grandmothers, Phils mother (shes blind), Kats girlfriends (they smoke, drink, and gossip in the basement), the Detective Scieziesciez (its pronounced shh-shh-shh), whom Kat seduces (hes more manly than Dad), beginning a long affair; and then, and then . . . . Then all will end surprisingly indeed, with Mom, as it happens, never having left home at all, but just, wellchilling out. Ambitious writing in equal parts elegant and excessive, with a psychology that spins out of control and goes poof. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Laura Kasischke teaches creative writing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyperion; First Edition (January 13, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786863668
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786863662
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.88 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,167,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #18,104 in Family Saga Fiction
- #99,972 in American Literature (Books)

Customer Reviews:
270

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Laura Kasischke

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Laura Kasischke teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and the Residential College. She has published seven collections of poetry and seven novels. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan.

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

270 global ratings

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Kittens Rule

This book knocked my socks off

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2023

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Holllllyyyyy moly this book is awesommmme!!! The writing is gorgeous and the plot rules. Nice. Five more words required. One more.

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Wendy S The Loving Fifty

so beautiful. I had to stop and re-read sentences and ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2014

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This book was NEARLY flawless and the writing is superb. Her metaphors ----- ahhh, so beautiful. I had to stop and re-read sentences and paragraphs because they were so expertly written.

But - there is a pretty big element to the plot that is a leap of faith…. I don't want to spoil it or the book here but there is something that happens, actually DOESN'T HAPPEN that is just completely implausible.

Otherwise - heartbreakingly beautiful book and one that I recommended to my sister and others already. Super easy and fast read - done in 24 hours.

4 people found this helpful

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Reader

Beautifully written... if only it didn't have such a poor ending!

Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2009

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This has to be one of the most beautifully written novels I have read of late. "White Bird..." is a wistful and elegiac coming-of-age story, set in small-town Ohio and following Katrina Connors as she blossoms into a beautiful teenager, has her first sexual experiences, and -most importantly- tries to make sense of her mother's unexplained disappearance.

Told from the main character's perspective, the story develops richly and believably, as Kat reflects on her parents' failed marriage, her mother's bitterness and cruelty, and her kindly, dull father's attempts to continue living after she vanishes. The prose is incredibly lush and beautiful, whether the descriptions are of Ohio in the dead of winter or of Katrina's own states of mind.

The only reason why I didn't give it more stars was its implausible, contrived ending. It's as if, 75% into the novel, Ms. Kasischke had suddenly decided that what she wanted to write was a mystery novel instead of a character-based one --- or as if she had wanted to finish it quickly and had just wrapped everything up in this silly conclusion. And this is where the book, in my opinion, fails. The ending is not only unlikely (i.e., what happens could hardly have happened without anyone finding out soon enough) but also anticlimactic and disappointing. I'd have enjoyed the novel much more if Ms. Kasischke hadn't changed courses, and had continued with the wonderful story that had me hooked from the start!

4 people found this helpful

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Alissa

Beautiful and disturbing

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2014

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This story is beautifully written. While it is slow moving, the metaphors that the character uses to describe her life and family add a depth to the story that is intriguing. At every page, something mysterious is revealed, leaving the reader to play detective and solve the mystery. The ending is abrupt but it works because it leaves the reader breathless. This is the kind of story that will stay in your mind for a long time after, and make you think about yourself and everyone else around you.

3 people found this helpful

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Angela Matson

Better than I thought, but unfinished.

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2014

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The book started out slow, I thought it would be about Kat' s journey in accepting her mother's disappearance, but it ended up being more of a mystery. I loved the book but was really disappointed by how unfinished it felt. If you like a good mystery though I recommend this book, and if you like a book with a perfect fairytale ending then perhaps you should be looking for a different book.

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2022

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I get wanting to be lyrical. And sometimes the writer is able to create a powerful image with her words. And other times...the word choice leaves the reader scratching their heads. Example..."it tasted like something you'd find in a virgins mouth at the beach". Umm. Okay. The characters are not likeable. Not one of them. The ending is a let down.

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CO_Bradleys

Not a huge plot, but ok.

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2014

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This book was ok, not my favorite. The thing that kept me reading was wanting to know what happened to the mom. Besides that there really wasn't anything that kept me going. I wasn't wondering about anything else but the mom. It was very wordy and descriptive which can be good but in this case I didn't see the point in it because it didn't really have anything to do what happened to the mom. The ending was a little disappointing. It ends suddenly and there's not much explanation. Some people like those kinds of ending but it just wasn't for me!

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2015

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Read this book after watching the movie. Loved both the book and the movie slough for once I actually prefer the movie lol normally I prefer the book. This is a good read though and the character dynamic is interesting. The emotions are raw and real and often put words to what many people are thinking but won't actually say.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

I loved this book

Reviewed in Canada on November 15, 2014

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I loved this book. Loved the story, the writing and poetic flow. I picked this book because I seen on Ellen that there was a movie coming out by this name and figured ah just for the heck of it I'll see if there is a book. I have a thing about reading the book before seeing the movie whenever possible so I got it. Well now that I have read the book and enjoyed it I can't wait to see the movie too.

D. Legare

Univers glaçant

Reviewed in France on December 22, 2014

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Ambiance glacée dans ce roman de Laura Kasischke. D’habitude Laura Kasischke nous installe d’abord dans une ambiance de normalité avant de nous faire basculer petit à petit dans un monde où rien ne va plus. Ici, d’emblée, le décor est planté dans une famille dysfonctionnelle où la mère disparait par un après-midi très froid du mois de janvier.

J’ai du mal à résister à cette belle phrase d’introduction que je vous livre ‘in English’ car Laura Kasischke a du style, un très joli style :

“I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon - pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her, perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance - and disappears.
No one sees her leave, but she is gone.”

C’est à partir de cette phrase glaçante qu'elle nous fait découvrir l’univers familial d’une adolescente, Kat, qui se sent mal aimée par cette mère disparue qui n’avait de cesse de lui faire des remarques humiliantes. C’est une femme froide et sans amour que cette mère, qui tient une maison aseptisée et entretient des rapports aseptisés ou teintés de dégoût avec son mari. Kat, la fille un peu déboussolée, s’efforcera sans relâche de comprendre le pourquoi de cette disparition si soudaine et sans explication, tout en pansant ses blessures affectives.

Un Oiseau Blanc Dans Le Blizzard fait partie des ‘bons’ romans de Laura Kasischke qui nous livre parfois des œuvres inégales. Ici elle tisse un univers glacial, ou tout semble transi sous une fine couche de givre, que ce soient les personnages, leurs sentiments, la maison, ou ce qui les entoure à l’extérieur. L’évocation d’atmosphères très particulières constitue le point fort de Laura Kasischke, c’est là qu’elle excelle, et c’est à partir là qu’elle arrive à nous séduire et à nous entraîner jusqu’au bout du blizzard.

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Under Ether

Memorable

Reviewed in Canada on December 29, 2019

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Beautiful writing. Haunting and sad. I enjoyed reading this book immensely.

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