Sparrow Migrations - excerpt from 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Entry

by Cari Noga

Consider the sparrow.Robby Palmer certainly does. And the pigeons. And the red-tailed hawks. The woodpeckers, the robins and the geese. Especially the geese. During a trip to New York with his parents, Robby, a 12-year-old with autism, witnesses the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane crash while aboard a sightseeing ferry. He becomes obsessed with geese, whose post-takeoff strike is eventually determined to cause the crash. His obsession provides a precarious perch from which Robby dares, for the first time, to mingle with the rest of the world.Consider the future.Deborah DeWitt-Goldman ponders it constantly. She’s half of an academic power couple at Cornell University, along with her husband, Christopher Goldman. Like the conscientious planners they’ve always been, they’ve just completed prenatal genetic testing before officially embarking on their parental quest and are vacation-bound passengers on Flight 1549. As they await rescue on the wings, icy water lapping their feet, a text arrives on Christopher’s mobile. Deborah, who’s silently begun to tire of their perfectly predictable lives, thinks she imagines the worst: They can’t have children. But the text’s consequences are far more ominous than a childless life.Consider the truth.Brett Richards is cowering before it. A middle-aged preacher’s wife who’s been hiding a secret for years, she’s aboard the ferry, too. Exposed by the fluke of walking past a TV camera while her incredulous daughter Amanda watches crash coverage at home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Brett must weigh her fear of discovery against her daughter’s judgment.Sparrow Migrations is a story of ordinary people whose lives are transformed by the coincidence of an extraordinary event -- and by each other. As Robby learns, however, no matter how long and harrowing the migration, birds can always find their way home.

22 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 22, 2011

About the author

I'm so appreciative of all the readers who've reviewed The Orphan Daughter and Sparrow Migrations, and especially grateful to those who have selected them as book club choices. If your club has, I'd love to have a picture for my website, or join via Skype if we can coordinate schedules. Email me at cari@carinoga.com. (You can also sign up for my author newsletter www.carinoga.com -- the best way to hear about a new book!)

If you've not read my books yet, I write resilience stories about contemporary, unconventional families. My latest, The Orphan Daughter, explores whether prickly Jane McArdle will do better at motherhood her second time around, after her orphaned niece Lucy Ortiz moves from New York City to Jane's Michigan farm. It's set where I've lived for 20 years, Traverse City, Michigan, which made it a lot of fun to write.

Resilience in a theme in my author journey as well. After failing to finish two manuscripts, I finally completed my debut, Sparrow Migrations, during National Novel Writing Month in 2010. It becames a semi-finalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, with Publishers Weekly describing the manuscript as “brimming with humanity and grace.” Sparrow’s protagonist, Robby Palmer, a 12-year-old boy with autism, and his parents, Sam and Linda, embody many experiences my husband and I have had as parents to a son with autism. I self-published it in 2013 and then was lucky enough to receive an acquisition offer from Lake Union Publishing an imprint of Amazon Publishing, in 2014. Sparrow was re-released in paperback, digital, and audio formats in June 2015. It was nominated for the Great Michigan Read, a statewide reading project, in 2015-16. A five-part small-screen miniseries adaptation is now available - producers wanted!

You can stay in touch by signing up for my author e-mail newsletter at www.carinoga.com. Thanks for reading!