First Fiction Fridays: Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi

What:Prairie Ostrich (Goose Lane Editions, 2014)Who:Born in Japan, raised in Canada, Tamai Kobayahsi is a writer, song-writer, and videographer. She is the author of two story collections, Exile and the Heart and Quixotic Erotic, whose vivid, electric prose has garnered considerable critical acclaim. Prairie Ostrich is her first novel.Why you need to read this now:Tamai Kobayashi is a writer to watch. Within the pages of Prairie Ostrich it’s easy to see why. There is a sparse yet lyrical quality to Kobayashi’s prose, a quality which seems to echo the beauty and harshness of the landscapes — both internal and external — in which her characters find themselves.In Bittercreek, Alberta, bookish eight-year-old Imogene “Egg” Murakami tries to make sense of the world around her even as it unravels. Egg’s older brother Albert has died in an accident, her father has moved into the barn of the family’s ostrich farm, and her teenage sister Kathy struggles to keep things together as their mother drinks to submerge her grief.Life outside of Egg’s home is little better. Bittercreek does not celebrate diversity or independent thought. As the inquisitive youngest daughter of the only Japanese family for miles, she is relentlessly tormented. Each school day starts and ends with one goal: survival. She throws out the rice balls her mother makes for her and hides during lunch. She knows superheroes aren’t real but still longs for them.“In her socks, Egg glides down the hallway, as if on ice. She’s like the Flash, so fast you can see only a blur. The Flash is almost invisible, but it’s the almost that troubles her, the red streak of almost that catches the eye. Superheroes save the day. She knows they are fiction, but a part of her wants so much for them to be real, like Newton’s equal and opposite forces.”Egg turns to books to make sense of the world. Books have morals, and if she can find the moral to her own story perhaps it can have a happy-ever-after, like the books her sister reads to her. But unbeknownst to Egg, Kathy has been changing the endings of the stories she reads, creating a world where Anne Frank escapes to America and Charlotte continues spinning her web.Prairie Ostrich is a novel of quiet intensity. Egg sees things others do not and struggles to make sense of them through the perspective of a child. It is a compelling drama of rare insight into the ways a family and a town can isolate each other. Prairie Ostrich is one girl’s attempt to find her place against schoolyard battles and the mysteries of the adult world.*****Thank you to Kathleen and Goose Lane for sharing this beautiful book!