YELLOW BIRDS

A young Canadian woman following a touring rock band in the mid-1990s finds acceptance, love, heartache, and, ultimately, herself in Green’s novel.

Kait is one of the self-proclaimed Yellow Birds, fans who track their favorite band, Open Road, from city to city. (New to the Birds and their hippie lifestyle, she proudly spells her newly chosen name with an i.) Kait initially follows Open Road with friends, but they go home after a few days, and she continues on with some newly met Birds on the band’s West Coast tour, a thousand miles from her home. One night in Eugene, Oregon, while smoking a communal joint, she meets the “spectacularly hot” Horizon Evans. They become a couple, and she loves sitting in “the girlfriend seat” next to him in his car. “Every new discovery we made about each other seemed like one note following another, building towards a melody that became the prettiest song I ever heard,” she observes. They share their secrets—how Kait got the long scar on her arm, the fact that her mom is a hoarder, the story of Horizon’s last girlfriend’s descent into drug use—but a secret they learn together is life altering for them both. Green expertly captures the mood and spirit of a traveling community who “relied on itself, and the people within the community, for everything.” Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six will eagerly devour this account of love, sex, emotional intimacy, and music. Green’s pacing is good, and her descriptions are vivid. But it’s her insights that can be truly delicious, such as when she describes the perfect spot for a person to place their hand on another’s back: “In the small of your back—when a hand is there, it means there is affection, familiarity. You can judge a relationship by noticing the very simple act of where one person’s hand rests on another person’s back.”

A long, strange trip, beautifully told.