ABOUT THE BOOK

All for the Birds

In the eighteen years Ava had lived on the planet, she had rescued hundreds of birds, sometimes on her own, other times with her mother. This was what she knew as normal, as right, as the only solution for saving the most fragile creatures on the planet.

She took note that her heart was rapidly pounding in her chest, not just from the fifteen-minute sprint back to the car but also from pure adrenaline, the type she usually felt after a rescue. But she felt more, so much more. Glimpses of what had happened in the last half hour crept into her thoughts. It could have been longer than a half hour because the altercation had already started to take on a dreamlike quality. How much time had passed since she had first encountered the attackers trying to drown the baby birds? How much time since she held their heads under water to drown them instead? And then there was the thrashing, the god-awful thrashing. The creek was not deep, and she had heard their muffled screams while she’d submerged them. They had tried to kill the helpless babies, but she had put an end to them instead.