Birdie

Road trip, quest for dreams, and travelogue all in one – Birdie explores the universality of female experiences that transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries. Bernice Metoos will not be broken. The tall, beautiful Cree woman Bernice, known as Birdie, with a dark secret in her past, leaves her home in northern Alberta to travel to Gibsons, B.C. She is on a kind of vision quest, searching for family, for a home, for understanding, for the meaning of her dreams. When her aunt Val and her cousin Skinny Freda come to visit her in Gibsons, Birdie begins to draw lessons from her dreams that she was never taught in life. Shaped by the traditions and knowledge of Cree culture, Birdie is a moving novel full of dark humor about the universal experience of recovering from trauma. It is the story of an extraordinary woman who journeys to the deepest hidden part of herself to find the strength to confront her past and build a new life.