THE STRANGE BIRDS OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR

This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery O’Connor’s childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness.

With its memorable opening line, “Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens,” the book celebrates her fascination with life’s peculiarities—and death: “How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness,” the text remarks about her grief at her father’s passing. Deciding that she wants to write stories “as strange as death,” she chooses staring as a writer’s tool, plumbing the “hidden strangeness” of people and looking for “flashes of good” in complicated characters. After college and a brief stint writing in New York, she is diagnosed with lupus and returns home to Georgia. Alznauer includes some appropriately grim humor, as in young Flannery’s fondness for a photo of a rooster that lived for a month without its head, and classroom humor as well: Flannery flings elastic from her braces at an impatient Sister Consolata. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhu’s illustrations align with the book’s focus on eccentricity, adding some imagined characters of color to the mostly white cast of historical figures. The thoughtful design—at 12 inches square, as outsized as its subject—includes a type chosen because its designer, like O’Connor, had a love for drawing birds. Backmatter fleshes out O’Connor’s life and personality and includes a bibliography; it’s not clear if the book’s dialogue is directly quoted or invented.

A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision.