The best books are like magic spells or time machines, they transform you, take you wonderful places, and show you amazing things. You forget that you are seeing words and pages, you hear and see and feel and know instead. You make friends that you worry and wonder about, you flee enemies who make your heart race, you live in a world momentarily more real than our own. And if you are lucky and the author is wise and skilled, when the book is done it is not finished because something stays with you. Something more precious than words, a sense that you know something more of this world and your place in it because of where this book has taken you.
ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY is such a book. It's a tale of magic and science, of a girl who talks to birds and a boy who dreams of rocket ships and time machines. The girl becomes a witch and the boy becomes a scientist who makes fearsome and fascinating machines. The two of them are destined to collide or fall in love, destroy the world or save it or perhaps some of each.
ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY contains multitudes -- an assassin who loves ice cream, birds that talk, trees that know, gadgets that crack wise. It is funny and frightening and fantastic and true, true in the way that great fiction can be -- beautiful and horrible, filled with loneliness and friendship, mistakes and forgiveness, humor and heartbreak.
This is a book I love too much to tell you too much about, the joy of discovery is diminished if the map is too clear. So open the pages and open a door. You are going on a wonderful journey with people and a few creatures you will never forget.
