... a sincere and searing tale of loss, addictive despair, the redemptive power of love, the natural world and a shit-dropping, feather-moulting talking magpie ... This will undoubtedly be held up alongside H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s memoir that saw her tame her grief and a bird of prey in her living room. But Featherland is an equal, if not better, work of magpie investigation that ranks among the best modern coming-of-age memoirs.
... engrossing ... alternately touching and humorous ... Although the book deftly interweaves seemingly disparate threads, the narrative itself begins straightforwardly enough ... anyone who has ever cared for a living creature will find much to identify with in Gilmour’s affectionate, sometimes exasperated account of the magpie who comes to be called Benzene ... Gilmour becomes fond of Benzene, whose flights fill his protector with mixed emotions ... Such sentiments make the author’s parallel story all the more powerful: Diving deep into his past, Gilmour recounts the painful absence of his father ... At once droll and wise, this is an unforgettable memoir.
... a magical book of exhilarating complexity, the story of blood, bird shit, tears and hope ... Featherhood is a book that swoops and soars with a luminosity of language worn with the lightness of a gossamer wing, a book filled with scenes of semi-hallucinogenic beauty in which an arrival in a forest carpeted with ‘sweetly scented chamomile’ causes footsteps to ‘bruise aroma from the leaves’ and where a magician’s ‘near-invisible spider-silk thread charms notes from thin air’. Written with heart-stopping honesty, this is a book of unspooling secrets which shock, challenge and make you laugh aloud; one in which a bird’s bluebottle-and-beetle birthday cake is at once ‘strangely beautiful and stomach churningly foul’, and where even the gory, moving immediacy of death demonstrates the omnipresent fight for survival ... Featherhood challenges our perception of creatures of the wild, celebrates the certainties of romantic commitment and prompts a profound reconsidering of the nature of patriarchal love.
In folklore, magpies are said to bring bad luck, but that certainly wasn’t the case for Charlie Gilmour. An abandoned baby bird helped this young British author finally exorcise the long shadow cast by his biological father, who abandoned him as an infant. Gilmour’s remarkable memoir, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, explains in lively, compelling detail how caring for this bird prepared him to become a father himself. With razor-sharp wit and storytelling, Gilmour interweaves the story of this bird, whom he and his partner named Benzene, with that of his past ... Featherhood represents the debut of a talented young writer reckoning with an unusual past.
... moving, though often spiky ... Featherhood is an incisive, funny and at times traumatic study of the damage done by destructive father-son relationships and the struggle to smash generational cycles. You probably won’t want your own magpie after it, but you may give your dad a call.
Interwoven with [Gilmour's] narrative of pain and sadness is his relationship with a magpie that he and his ever patient fiancee rescued and nursed to health ... Eventually, the author gained perspective on the causes of his father’s abandonment, and he assuaged his fears about his own mind: 'who your father is,' he realizes, 'isn’t who you have to be.' Though not quite on that level, this one will fit nicely on the shelf next to H Is for Hawk. A sensitive, often moving chronicle of transformation for bird and man.
Journalist Gilmour debuts with a moving chronicle of his transition from being 'a serial shirker of responsibility' to a devoted family man ... The author’s introspection is rewarding without becoming maudlin, and his poetic take on the complexities of father/son relationships resonates. This spirited outing hits all the right buttons for memoir lovers.
