The Song of the Blue Bird
Desert Songs Trilogy
Blessed with longevity, a granddaughter of Leah sees her people through to freedom in Esther Goldenberg’s triumphant, trilogy-closing novel The Song of the Blue Bird.
Throughout major periods of Jewish history, Blue is there. She is there when her mother, Deenah, escapes from her brothers, who slaughtered her husband. She is there when her tribe reunites with Joseph in Egypt. She is there when a baby, Moses, is pulled from the reeds, and there for the burning bush, exodus, and entrance into Israel that follow. She is there when Jerusalem is besieged by the Romans too, writing down a forgotten history with bold women at its center.
For much of her lifespan, Blue does not grow old; instead, at periodic moments in the history of the Israelites, she is called to walk with Yah, and wakes up in future, consequential moments. These and other supernatural wonders are at the heart of the novel, which unearths emancipating truths from the biblical record.
It records the shifting of Rosh Chodesh to the new moon and a feminist version of dayenu; its version of Leah, after protecting her disappeared daughter, explains that “”Whore … is a word men use to describe a woman who makes choices for herself instead of her husband or her father or her brothers owning her body.” And though its heroine does not always understand her destiny in full, lamenting from the pharaoh’s harem that she’s “learned the longsuffering of not being able to make the big change” herself, she is nonetheless a pillar of wisdom, resilience, and determination. She finds cause to rejoice in elements as minute as the smell of cinnamon and a kitten’s purr, and as major as meeting the descendants of Jacob across the ages.
The Song of the Blue Bird is the heartening closing novel of a lovingly subversive biblical trilogy.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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