Hi friends, I hope all is well. Today I’m going to be posting my review of Morgan Murray’s novel Dirty Bird.

I read this for my Canada Reads project (reading all the nominated books for #CanadaReads)

Dirty Birds by: Morgan Murray: Milton Ontario, a guy who grew up in Saskatchewan just wants to be a poet. But when he’s told over and over again that it’s a dying art medium he takes off for Montreal where he tries to pursue his dreams. This novel had so many ups and downs and just kinda felt all over the place. The fact that the plot took these weird twists and turns left the reader feeling confused and at times they lost what the point of the novel was. This was basically a coming of age story about a boy who wanted to become a poet and then became obsessed with a girl he thought he was in love with, all while becoming weirdly famous. The characters didn’t feel like anything special; there wasn’t anything that felt memorable, what happened to them felt more relatable and significant than they were as characters, and that’s what kept the reader reading. The Canadian references were good, and some of the Canadian history was good too, there were also moments that the reader thought were funny, but there were also a lot of immature, supposed to be funny antidotes that fell flat. The pacing of this novel was fast, but after a while the jokes and stories started to drag and feel really long and the reader just wanted it to be over. The addition of the hand drawings were, like the jokes, either a hit or a miss, but they did help move the story along. Overall, this wasn’t the most enjoyable read, but this definitely did have moments where it was good, it was just unfortunate that the inadequate outweighed the good.