Bird Suit
by Sydney Hegele
Invisible Publishing
272 pages
$16.95
“The Port Peter peaches lure tourists,” begins Sydney Hegele’s debut novel, Bird Suit, and their hypnotic writing lures readers into this sickly-sweet saga just as effectively.
Nestled on the shores of fictional Lake Ligeia, the town of Port Peter survives off the summer glut of tourists who spend their cash in the town’s bizarre collection of businesses, drink peach juice with vodka until they’re sick, and leave local teens pregnant. Unwanted children are given up to the mysterious bird women of the lake—except the bird women don’t accept Georgia Jackson. Spirited, self-loathing, and now twenty-two, Georgia rushes into a tangled sexual relationship with the town’s new priest and his wife, both twenty years her senior. As her clandestine encounters intensify and she befriends the couple’s nerdy, gentle son, Isaiah, Georgia finds herself at the nexus of three families’ and three generations’ traumas, all coming to a head.
The seemingly endless barrage of large and small violences swirling around the characters in Bird Suit is broken up by colourful, inane details about Port Peter’s residents, and sudden laugh-out-loud moments of joyful friendship between Georgia and Isaiah. Georgia’s absurd sense of humour often precedes immensely impactful moments—“I would make the best [chicken] nugget: crispy and tender and fucking delicious,” she thinks, just paragraphs before a tearjerking stream-of-consciousness internal monologue in the middle of a sex scene. Pages later, we learn of another abuser, another betrayal, another set of wounds inflicted. The knot of relationships is like a just-too ripe peach: some bites sticky and delicious, others rotten.
The deceptively compact novel unspools into a multi-generational story about trauma cascading down family lines and spilling out beyond them. Hegele moves fluidly across time, following emotional resonance rather than temporal linearity to effectively sketch out the relationships and wounds of more than half a dozen characters across fifty years. “We don’t need to pass down bad love like a family heirloom,” one father says to another. The advice doesn’t stick—by then we have read well into the future and have seen the years of violence to come—but Bird Suit honours the ways its characters cope with the horrors inflicted upon them, and looks to those gestures of care for the heirlooms worth holding onto and passing on instead. The stories stitched together across time grow into an emotional crescendo that leads to the gutting core of the story and—against all odds—beyond it, to what recovery looks like, and if it is even possible. Twisting a signature CanLit fabulism until it is almost horror, Bird Suit delves into the simultaneously earthshattering and mundane ways that people hurt each other, looking for the murky path toward outliving trauma.
