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The Fragility of Nature
The Falcon and the Songbird follows a girl coming of age in Texas whose private world is overtaken by the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, racial injustice, land greed, and the fight to protect a fragile natural habitat. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was fifteen and going to school in a small Texas town the day JFK was assassinated. It was the most devastating, shocking, unthinkable thing that had ever happened to me. Like April, I grew up loving nature and animals. At the time, I was not very sensitive to the fragility of nature, and I was also rather indifferent about racial injustice. It was only gradually, and later in life, that these subjects became important to me.
April feels both innocent and perceptive. How did you develop her voice?
I wanted to capture how a girl sees things and people around her as she is growing up. I started writing this novel several decades ago (!) and so I was able to put down my own feelings and memories.
How did you approach writing about the social and political tensions of the early 1960s?
Surprisingly, many people born after around 1970 are unaware, or even ignorant of the social and political upheavals of the 60’s. I wanted to weave this into the story in a way that people could relate to.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I am too busy at present getting this book “out there” to be thinking about my next book.
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A rare bird nests exclusively in the Texas Hill Country, and Clay, a sensitive young biologist, is determined to save it from extinction. He gets assistance from April, who finds herself increasingly drawn to him, even though she has long determined that she will never end up like the other adult women around her.
The Falcon and the Songbird
The Falcon and the Songbird, by Susan Kay Harris, follows April Winford, a perceptive girl coming of age in the Texas Hill Country during the early 1960s, as her private world of horses, family tensions, first love, and friendship is overtaken by the public tremors of Kennedy’s presidency, his assassination, racial injustice, land greed, and the fight to protect a fragile natural habitat. What begins as a young girl’s intimate remembrance widens into a story about conscience, how it wakes, how it wounds, and how it asks ordinary people to become braver than they planned.
I was drawn first to the novel’s strong sense of place. The Hill Country is not merely scenery here; it breathes, with its rain-starved grass, limestone ridges, ranch roads, birdsong, and the half-wild freedom of Moona, April’s horse. Harris writes April’s girlhood with a vivid inwardness, catching the awkwardness of adolescence without making it small. April is romantic, stubborn, naïve, observant, and sometimes painfully wrong, which makes her feel alive. The book is at its best when it lets innocence brush against danger before April fully understands what she has encountered.
I loved the way the novel braids personal awakening with historical disillusionment. Kennedy’s assassination does not sit in the background as decoration; it alters the moral weather of the book. The story can be sprawling, and at times its political conversations become more explicit than subtle, but I appreciated its ambition. It wants to connect a girl’s first difficult loyalties, to her mother, to Clay, to Ronnie, to the land itself, with the larger betrayals of a country entering a darker age. That gives the novel a raw, earnest charge, a kind of flint-struck sincerity.
I think this book is best suited for readers who enjoy reflective historical fiction, coming-of-age novels, Southern fiction, and stories about moral courage. Readers who admire the ethical awakening and regional atmosphere of To Kill a Mockingbird may find a familiar gravity here, though Harris’s novel is more openly political and more meditative in its treatment of land, memory, and loss. The Falcon and the Songbird is a heartfelt and searching novel about the hour when childhood ends, and conscience begins to sing.
Pages: 320 | ISBN : 978-2839949330
