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Starling Days

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The moving new novel by the author of Harmless Like You, a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice and NPR Great Read

On their first date, Mina told Oscar that she was bisexual, vegetarian, and on meds. He married her anyhow. A challenge to be met. She had low days, sure, but manageable. But now, maybe not so much . . . Mina is standing on the George Washington Bridge late at night, staring over the edge, when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the policeman she's not about to jump, but he doesnt believe her. Oscar is called to pick her up.

With the idea of leaving New York for Londona place for Mina to learn the floorplan of this sadnessOscar arranges a move. In London, Mina, a classicist, tries grappling with her mental health issues by making lists. Of WOMEN WHO SURVIVED. Penelope, Psyche, Leda. Iphigenia, but only in one of the tellings. Of things that make her HAPPY— enamel coffee cups. But what else? She at last finds a beam of light in Phoebe, and friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Minas complicated love is tested.

A gorgeously wrought novel, variously about love, mythology, mental illness, Japanese beer, and the times we need to seek out milder psychological climates, Rowan Hisayo Buchanans Starling Dayswritten in exquisite prose rich with lightly ironic empathyis a complex and compelling work of fiction by a singularly gifted young writer.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 24, 2020
      Buchanan (Harmless Like You) traces the strain of depression on a marriage in this bleak and eloquent novel. Six months after 32-year-old classicist Mina Umeda marries her boyfriend of 10 years, she walks pensively across the George Washington Bridge amid a depressive episode. Confronted by the police, she’s unable to convince them she was just clearing her head. Oscar, her Japanese-British husband, picks her up and suggests they go to London to distract her from her depression. There, she ruminates on an unfinished project about Greco-Roman myths titled The Women Who Survived. When Mina’s decision to go off her antidepressants and birth control exacerbates her illness, Oscar grows casually cruel in his frustration (“Nobody gets the life they thought they would”). He returns to New York City while Mina embarks on an affair with Phoebe, the sister of Oscar’s best friend. After Mina’s frantic fixation on Phoebe begins to push her away, Oscar returns to London and the married couple struggles forward. Buchanan sharply observes the confusing sensations of depression (“Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a box of tomatoes and stand by the fridge eating them out of a paper carton”). Readers willing to brave the darkness will find a worthy, nuanced portrait of a woman’s struggle for self-determination amid mental illness.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from February 1, 2020
      Depression, like other psychiatric conditions, is often treated as a personal failure, a refusal to pull oneself together and do what's needed. Oscar is at his wit's end. Although he and Mina have been together for 10 years, the deterioration of his wife's mental health has left him baffled. On the surface everything is fine: They finally married six months ago, and while Mina's academic career is floundering, he has a decent job working with his dad. What's more, they have a nice-enough Manhattan apartment and plenty of friends. Why, then, did Mina gulp a handful of pills on their wedding night? And why, barely six months later, did police remove her from a ledge on the George Washington Bridge? As Oscar grapples with his wife's ostensible death wish, he is offered a chance to work in London for a few months. Thinking that a change of scene will benefit Mina, the pair upend their lives, sublet their NYC apartment, and move. Not surprisingly, their troubles follow them across the Atlantic, and when Oscar is summoned back to the U.S. for an emergency business meeting, he is forced to leave Mina alone; although a phone app is supposed to track her movements, it doesn't. What follows is a gripping, tender, and unsettling look at mental illness. Mina's impulsiveness and obsessive behaviors, seemingly illogical, are sympathetically drawn. So, too, is Oscar's desire to run head-on into more stable surroundings, far from depressive disorders and suicidal ideation. Poetic and understated, this nuanced work by Buchanan (Harmless Like You, 2017) also addresses adult-child relationships, the legacy of family trauma, and the challenge of offering unconditional love. Complex and resonant.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      April 1, 2020
      After a decade together, Oscar and Mina married, but on their wedding night, Mina downed all the pills she could find, yet somehow lived. Six months later, she's walking across George Washington Bridge. She's already sent one of her purple flip-flops into the dark below when a police car speaker demands she get into the waiting vehicle. Oscar rushes to claim her. He hopes that getting out of New York will help Mina; his father?for whom he's both only child and single employee?has a project request in London. For British-born Oscar, London will be part homecoming; for academic Mina, she's ostensibly taking her work along, researching (ironically) mythic Greek women survivors. Despite Oscar's devotion, Mina's brain insists, I want to die. But he's got other responsibilities, including his usually estranged father who is unexpectedly calling Oscar to his side. Life must go on? As in her debut, Harmless Like You (2017), literary darling Buchanan's newest presents another self-absorbed cast made memorably affecting by real-life challenges?distracted relationships, filial expectations, tiresome careers, and especially mental illness?which consume and debilitate daily lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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