| The Redemption of Elsdon Bird Revised Edition Contributor(s): Virtue, Noel (Author) |
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ISBN: 0720611660 ISBN-13: 9780720611663 Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2003 Annotation: Shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1987. New Zealander Noel Virtue creates here a wonderful account of childhood. Elsdon Bird is an affectionate and imaginative child who is raised in a family steeped in the religious intolerance of the Christian Brethren sect. After the family is forced to move because of father's proselytizing, young Elsdon tries to escape his family's religious fundamentalism by creating his own fragile world of imagination. When a sequence of disasters finally breaks up the family. Elsdon's amazing resilience and precocious humanity must see him through. A Peter Owen Modern Classic. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Fiction | Literary - Fiction | Coming Of Age - Fiction | Religious - General |
| Dewey: FIC |
| Series: Peter Owen Modern Classics |
| Physical Information: 0.36" H x 4.84" W x 7.48" (0.20 lbs) 200 pages |
| Themes: - Topical - Family |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Reminiscent of Oscar and Lucinda, this is the story of an imaginative child raised in the intolerant atmosphere of New Zealand's Christian Brethren. Elsdon Bird is an affectionate and imaginative child raised in a family steeped in the religious intolerance of the Christian Brethren sect. When his father is fired from his city workplace for proselytizing and trying to save his coworkers, the Birds are forced to leave Wellington and their odd-ball neighbors with whom the lonely, marginalized boy had some affinity, and move to a small, remote town in the north. Here, life might have changed for the better, but instead the family begins to disintegrate. Socially isolated beyond regular infusions of bigotry from the other Brethren families or holy rollers in the town, his parents descend further into a rigid looking-glass world of religious fundamentalism that uses Elsdon as a whipping boy for all its frustrations. Driven more and more into himself and inspired by The Jungle Book, Elsdon builds a fragile internal world maintained by conversations with cows and sheep. He also talks to a small voice in his head which, for a time, is the closest thing he has to a confidant. Yet, when a sequence of disasters finally breaks up the family, the endearing Elsdon's amazing resilience and precocious humanity see him win through in the end. |