A Bird in the House

Manawaka Sequence

by Margaret Laurence

One of Canada's most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic.

In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod--a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl's growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.
In this fourth book of the five-volume Manawaka series, Vanessa MacLeod takes her rightful place alongside the other unforgettable heroines of Manawaka: Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, Rachel Cameron in A Jest of God, Stacey MacAindra inThe Fire-Dwellers, and Morag Gunn in The Diviners.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Short Stories, Classics, Canadian Literature, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Canada's classic authoress was born Jean Margaret Wemyss on July 18, 1926 in the prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. Her Mom, Verna, passed away early. Her Aunt Margaret helped her Father take care of her for a year, then they married and had a Son. Their Father died two years afterwards. Aunt Margaret was a Mother to her, raising the kids in theirr maternal Grandfather's home.

Margaret wrote stories in elementary school. Her professional writing career began in 1943 with a job at the town newspaper and continued in 1944, when she entered the Honours English program at Winnipeg's United College (University Of Winnipeg.) After graduating in 1947, she was hired as a reporter for The Winnipeg Citizen. That year, she married Jack Laurence, a civil engineer.

Jack's profession took the couple to England, Somalia, and eventually Ghana, where Margaret gained an appreciation for Africa and the storytelling traditions of its peoples. It was in Africa that their children, Jocelyn and David, were born, and when Margaret began to work seriously on her writing. Her book of essays about and translations of Somali poetry and prose was published in 1954 as A Tree for Poverty. A collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer, as well as a novel, This Side Jordan (both focusing on African subjects) were published after Margaret returned home to Canada. Her fiction was thereafter concerned with Canadian subjects, but she maintained her interest in African literature and in 1968 published a critical analysis of Nigerian literature, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists 1952-1966. Present in her African works is a concern with the ethical dilemma of being a white colonialist living in colonial Africa.

In 1957, Margaret and her family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, for five years. In 1962, Margaret & Jack divorced. She moved to London, England for a year, followed by a cottage in Buckinghamshire for ten years, although she visited Canada often. During this period, Margaret wrote her first works with Canadian subject matter.

"The Stone Angel" was published in 1964, and was the first of her "Manawaka novels", the fictional prairie community modelled after her hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba. It was followed by "A Jest Of God" in 1966 (for which she won her first Governor General's Award,) "The Fire-Dwellers" in 1969, and "A Bird In The House" in 1970. Margaret received critical and commercial acclaim in Canada and in 1971, was honoured by being named a Companion to the Order of Canada.

In the early 1970s, she returned to Canada and settled in Lakefield, Ontario. She continued to write and was writer-in-residence at the University Of Toronto, the University Of Western Ontario, and Trent University. In 1974, Margaret completed her final novel, "The Diviners", for which she received the Governor General's Award and the Molson Prize. It was followed by a book of essays, Heart Of A Stranger" in 1976 and several children's books: "Jason's Quest", "The Olden-Days Coat", "Six Darn Cows", and "The Christmas Birthday Story". Her autobiography "Dance On The Earth" was published in 1987.

Margaret died on January 5, 1987 at her home in Lakefield, after learning her lung cancer diagnosis was terminal. She is buried in Neepawa Cemetery, a few metres from the stone angel which inspired her novel.

Reviews

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A semi-autobiographical novel told through eight interconnected stories. The setting is the fictional town Manawaka which is based on the author’s hometown Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. The central character, Vanessa, or simply Nessa for short, at the age of forty, now a married woman and herself a mother, looks back on earlier years. It may be classified as a coming of age tale. It focuses on her relationships with members of her family. Her mother, maternal aunt and grandfather, as well as both grandmothers take center stage. It is a story of character portrayal.

The stories cover happenings occurring in both world wars as well as the hard times tines in between—the Depression, lack of jobs and years of drought.

I want to impress on prospective readers that the characters are well drawn. The author knows what people say and how members of a family interact with each other. The words ring true. We view love, bitterness and wisecracks. We view reality. There is nothing splashy in the telling. With these words, I am trying to convey the feel of the book.

Assorted things thought about while reading this book:
*The reticence of men. How monosyllabic they can be.
*Trekking and camping—finding yourself positioned in your sleeping bag on top of a root.
*Everyone remarks how pretty stars are. They are in fact sizzling, burning, dead entities!
*The line, “I can always think about things myself!” made me smile and nod in agreement.
*Horses during a war. Few talk about what they undergo.
*As a kid, finding and snuggling down in old houses’ hidden alcoves. The smells of an attic, their rickety ladders, as well as the filled trunks and the bric-a-brac collected there.
*A half-husky named Nanuk, his fate and the fabrication told to a child.
I could easily relate to the people and the events making up the tales.

The stories fit together as puzzle pieces. It is for this reason this collection of eight stories reads as a single novel. Not being a fan of short stories, I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly satisfied.

I must mention just one more thing. The title hints of an important event that plays out in this novel. “A bird in the house” portends a death…….

Susan Geddes narrates the audiobook I listened to. Her reading is steady, calm and low key. It grew on me the longer I listened. It fits the prose well. I like it. The narration is worth three or four stars. I cannot decide.

Don’t miss this acclaimed Canadian author, Margaret Laurence (1926-1987). She understood common, ordinary people and knew how to capture in words their essence.

*****************************

Manawaka Sequence
*A Bird in the House 4 stars
*The Stone Angel 4 stars
*The Diviners TBR

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Add another new to me author to my ever-growing list, which is a by-product of preferring to discover forgotten writers of the past rather than reading contemporary fiction. Laurence is a new treasure, a Canadian author who was read widely in the past, and was prolific enough to keep me satisfied for a while.

Her most well known novels were part of the Manawaka Sequence series, unrelated except that they are centered in a small prairie town near Winnipeg, much like where she herself was raised. I chose this one to read first because it was described as interrelated short stories, but it read more like a novel to me, as the main characters in all the stories were Vanessa MacLeod and her family, mainly her grandfather, who was loved/hated, revered/feared by everyone. We meet Vanessa when she's 6 years old and follow her through her childhood. I entered their world whole-heartedly and watched like a fly on the wall.

I'm sorry to have finished and made to leave Manawaka for a short while. But I'll be back.

[C. (Comment, never msg). · Rating 4 out of 5]

* Comments matter a whole lot more than clicks and are why I write publically.

Every Margaret Laurence book reaches our empathy with anecdotal feelings. Even more memorable is exquisite wielding of language and unusually apt ways of conveying everything. I do not mean wordy. I relish among her attributes, the colloquialism of my Mom’s 1950s girlhood. Hearing our idioms is a Canadian’s joy. Margaret occupied the topmost calibre of skill: intelligent observations, elegance, and vividly rich tableaux of settings and meanings. I can picture her environments and there is humour so funny, I will be sure to quote it!

I need not picture everything. Her Wemyss Grandparent’s home, modelled for “A Bird In The House”, is in Neepawa. Better than imagined is this novel’s light nature. Were it not for one unhappy dog story, I would herald it with five stars. The titular bird came out okay! I like these 1970 personages more than those of “The Stone Angel” but that 1964 novel was more poignant.

Clara Thomas in “The Manawaka World Of Margaret Laurence” described a sour Grandfather. Have you noticed most protagonists are alone in their trials, which creates desperation? Vanessa’s Dad was alive for half of the novel and Grandmother a bit less long. Her Grandfather was merely rude. Her parents were loving and her Mom too, had a Sister with whom to commiserate.

Keen at connecting details, I see the Manawaka heroines’ timeframes. Hagar’s Father was a town pioneer. Vanessa is 1940s peers with Rachel & Stacey of “A Jest Of God” & “The Fire-Dwellers”. Morag, of the remaining book for me to read, grows up hearing about people those three teenagers knew. Here are scenes I laughed about heartily!

“I went to Sunday school, where there were red chairs that resembled kindergarten furniture and pictures of Jesus surrounded by a whole lot of well-dressed kids whose Mothers obviously had not suffered them to come unto Him until every face and ear was properly scrubbed”.

“Grandmother MacLeod, face as rigid as a cameo, brought her hands together.
Ewan, if that half-breed youngster comes to Diamond Lake, I’m not going.
I had trouble stifling my urge to laugh, for my Mother brightened visibly and quickly tried to hide it!”

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having almost nothing to do with this book, one of my earliest thoughts was what a powerhouse are the Canadian women authors. I feel very lucky to have accidentally discovered Margaret Laurence early, to be followed shortly by Alice Munro. So many are avid fans of Margaret Atwood (although I am not), and then there is Carol Shields and Gabrielle Roy. There are others on my list yet to try. Just simply fabulous women all of them! O Canada!

This title includes eight inter-connected stories. The copyright page indicated six of them had been previously published as stand alones. I'm glad I read them this way, but yes, all of them are self contained stories and any information needed from the earlier ones is mentioned so no continuity is lost. In fact, I think they are not in quite chronological order. The first person narrator is Vanessa MacLeod, who is 10 in the opening story. She does get older in subsequent stories, but there are two where Nessa's age spans several years and so revert to a younger self at their beginning.

Nessa's family is relatively small. Her father is one of the town doctors and we learn that her mother was his nurse at one time. We first meet the family on their way to Sunday dinner at the Brick House, where Nessa's Grandfather Connor lives. Grandfather Connor is an opinionated, irrascible old cuss with whom everyone tries to get along. It is also painfully obvious that getting along with him would try the patience of a saint - and only his wife actually manages it. I loved all of these characterizations, even when I did not like all of the characters. Even the minor supporting characters are well done.

The writing is just superb. In describing the Brick House on page one, Laurence writes By the mid-thirties, the spruces were taller than the house, and two generations of children had clutched at boughs which were as rough and hornily knuckled as the hands of old farmers, and had swung themselves up to secret sanctuaries. I became too interested in what she had to say for the most part to much more underlining.

I have not read *about* this book much, but it must be at least somewhat autobiographical. Vanessa MacLeod writes stories. She briefly tells us about them and sometimes about her inspiration. Many of these stories are abandoned. I sort of think that's probably how a 10-year old or a 12-year old would begin before learning enough to hone her craft. Writers are readers too, and I did like this: I was lying on the roof of the tool-shed, reading. An enormous spruce tree grew beside the shed, and the branches feathered out across the roof, concealing anyone who was perched there. I was fifteen, and getting too old to be climbing on roofs, my mother said.

Rarely am I sorry to come to the end of a book. Eight stories was not enough. Will I think of this as one of my top ten favorites? Maybe not. Maybe only top 25 - but that's pretty good, isn't it?

[Glenn Sumi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my second time reading Laurence’s short story collection, part of her acclaimed series of books (four novels, one collection) set in the fictional town of Manawaka, loosely based on her own childhood town of Neepawa, Manitoba.

I was surprised with how much I remembered from my first reading decades ago. Through snapshots, we witness the childhood and youth of a budding writer, Vanessa MacLeod, as she takes in the world around her. She’s an expert eavesdropper, and keeps little scribblers full of stories. Laurence knows how to make the reader understand something that Vanessa doesn’t — yet.

We see what Vanessa sees growing up during the Depression, witness the class and culture differences in her community (she’s particularly sensitive to the Indigenous population), and the effect of her stubborn paternal grandfather — whose presence looms over the book — on her life and philosophy.

One of the most moving lines comes at the end: “I had feared and fought the old man, yet he proclaimed himself in my veins,” she writes.

While I like being swept up in novels, I also like the patchwork quilt quality of interconnected short story collections. They show us life in snapshots, and it’s up to us to piece them together. In a sense, they reflect life in a more realistic way. Most of our lives consist of episodes; they don’t have the arc of a big novel.

Years ago on here, I gave this four stars, but I can’t really fault it with anything. This time I’m going with the full five. It’s a lovely book: compact, lyrical, funny, insightful and profound.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like reading short stories even though the form confounds me a bit. I've heard it said that short stories are harder to write than novels, so I often wonder why an author like Alice Munro chooses the format, and as a reader, as much as I love her collections, I feel a bit deflated as each story ends and I am compelled to pause and decide if I want to immediately start the process of meeting and understanding a whole new cast of characters on the next page. With A Bird In The House, Margaret Laurence blends the two formats with eight short stories about the same family, all from the perspective of Vanessa MacLeod, jumping back and forth between the ages of eight and fortyish. This felt like a bit of a cheat to me: even though I understand that each story appeared on its own in some magazine or other over the years, it was hard to consider each a complete work, knowing that the narrative would continue, that the characters and setting would be familiar, right there on the next page. This isn't a complaint, it just read like a novel instead of a collection of short stories, and it was a satisfying way of jumping through time to watch Vanessa mature and find her place in her family and the wider world.

The title of A Bird in the House has two meanings. In the first, Vanessa's gentle grandmother Connor has a pet canary:

She would try to coax the canary into its crystal trilling, but it was a surly creature and obliged only occasionally…When I asked my grandmother if the bird minded being there, she shook her head and said no, it had been there always and wouldn't know what to do with itself outside, and I thought this must surely be so, for it was a family saying that she couldn’t tell a lie if her life depended on it.

In grandmother Connor's view, the world is a scary place and staying in the safe and familiar (even remaining married to an abusive bully of a man) is preferable to venturing into the unknown. I am routinely astounded by the strength of the women in Margaret Laurence's books. While the people of grandmother Connor's generation might have valued respectability and the good opinions of neighbours above all (and submitting to this can take its own form of courage), their granddaughters, the Hagars and Morags and Vanessas, are given the self-awareness to rebel against these stifling restrictions and seek a selfish fulfillment, that by today's standards, is every person's birthright. I can be a bit impatient with strident feminism, but I do appreciate how far women have come in a relatively short period, thanks to the brave social pioneers who came before. Although grandmother Connor wasn't lying when she said that she didn't think the canary minded the cage, Maya Angelou, of the brave social pioneering generation, got it truer:

The free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wings
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and its tune is heard
on the distant hill for the caged bird
sings of freedom

In the second sense of the title, a hired girl remarks, upon freeing a sparrow that had found its way through a storm window, that a bird in the house means a death in the house. Vanessa's father dies soon after and the girl realises that death was always there, waiting to strike. Whether sitting beside him at church or later finding an old love letter that had been hidden away, Vanessa realised that she never really knew her father, not his inner thoughts anyway, and this theme is repeated throughout the book. When grandmother Connor dies, the family is shocked by how hard grandfather Connor takes it, and wonder if she ever knew the depths of his feelings. When the old man himself finally dies at 96, his daughters wonder if they had been too hard on him, not understanding enough.

My favourite story in the collection is Horses of the Night. Vanessa meets Chris, an older cousin who comes to live in Manawaka to attend high school. He has a free spirit that matches her own and they become good friends. When the circumstances of the Depression prevent him from attending university, when every plan he had to travel or make something of himself fails, he ends up back at the dirt poor farm he started out from. When Vanessa goes to visit him, he is the first person to ever freely share his innermost thoughts with her:

"People usually say there must be a God," Chris went on, "because otherwise how did the universe get here? But that's ridiculous. If the stars and planets go on to infinity, they could have existed forever, for no reason at all. Maybe they weren't ever created. Look-- what's the alternative? To believe in a God who is brutal. What else could He be? You've only got to look anywhere around you. It would be an insult to Him to believe in a God like that."

(I also like this quote because it reminded me of one of my all-time favourite quotes by John Banville in The Sea: Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.)

Vanessa is so embarrassed by Chris' naked frankness that she pretends to be asleep until he stops talking. This felt the most relatable-- there are people I can regret not knowing better, but I can also be embarrassed by the idea of closeness. One of the reasons I decided to challenge myself to write reviews here is in an effort to leave some sort of record of myself behind; this is a fairly low risk venue for putting down some memories and impressions, perhaps my kids will be interested someday in reading what I thought of some book or other, maybe a grandchild? (If I were to insert a hello, would it be from the grave?) Although this is my challenge, and one that I wish I had taken up sooner -- oh, the lovely books I have read and not reviewed! -- I can't see my sharing anything terribly personal here, or anywhere. Like Vanessa, I don't know if I would even want to know the innermost thoughts of the people around me-- I don't want to know those of my parents. I wouldn't want to know dark secrets of my grandparents. How far back would I need to go before the blood is thinned enough that I could dispassionately hear the secrets of my ancestors? How far forward would I go through the generations before I could comfortably choose a descendant to learn mine? I might be closer to grandmother Connor than Maya Angelou after all; the bird in my house doesn't long to be freed.

A couple of nice lines to end on:

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

No human word could be applied. The lake was not lonely or untamed. These words relate to people, and there was nothing of people here. There was no feeling about the place. It existed in some world in which man was not yet born. I looked at the grey reaches of it and felt threatened. It was like the view of God which I had held since my father's death. Distant, indestructible, totally indifferent.



As a final note, I am sorry that this is the last of the Manawaka Series that I had to read. Over the course of five books, Margaret Laurence created a lovely little time capsule, a true treasure.

[Anna Dittlau · Rating 4 out of 5]

En väldigt melankolisk läsning. Men jag käkade upp det totalt. Glider ner på fyra stjärnor eftersom det bitvis kändes lite repetativt; de åtta novellerna skulle kunna kortas ner till färre. Kommer definitivt läsa om!

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Wisecracks, honey,” Uncle Terence replied, very gently. “Just wisecracks.”

A moving, writerly collection of stories. My two favourites were the title story and “The Mask of the Bear,” in which Uncle Terence explains what’s what. It’s the kind of book one might have read in high school back in the day (what do the kids read now?), with good reason.

[kp · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an old favorite, and I picked it up to choose a story to include in my first-year lit class in the fall. Laurence renders beautifully the balance between skepticism and wonder that characterizes one girl's developing insights into the structure of the adult world that restrains and consoles her. Each story is a jewel of introspection, but taken together, they form an episodic novel that is to me one of the most moving accounts in literature of finding your way through family dynamics. The child at the centre of the stories, Vanessa, is sensitive to the undercurrents of emotion that rage beneath the sometimes placid, sometimes dour, sometimes cruel personae of her progenitors, but the book is most moving when its narrator captures the limits of such insight, the sense that everyone who comes before us is shaped by a multi-layered past, that they will shape us in turn, and that we can get only glimpses of how and why it all means something.

[Laura Gpie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is home to me.
I read each of the short stories in this book on their own originally, and out of order, over a number of years. And I've read them together as a novella countless times. They stand alone, and they stand as a coherent, interconnected story.
Laurence masterfully captures the voice of Vanessa, her young protagonist, in a way that doesn't condescend to children, but also doesn't grant comprehension beyond their experience. In part, she accomplishes this by telling the story as a recollection. This allows for Vanessa's childhood naivete and process of learning to be at the forefront, while still allowing implications to be drawn and connections to larger issues made. A Bird in the House is a coming of age story at its best; it's what makes this book identifiable, heartwarming, and, at times, utterly heartbreaking. And it's what keeps me coming back to it. Over and over.

[Mj · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bird in the House is the fourth book in the Manawaka Series by Margaret Laurence - the common denominators being a female narrator and the fictional town of Manawaka, a small town in Saskatchewan, where the narrator currently or once lived.

In A Bird in the House, the female narrator is Vanessa MacLeod, a fourteen year old girl when the story starts and middle-aged whe her story ends. Vanessa’s early dreams are to become a writer and she acts as one from a young age. She is very observational, makes deductions about people and connections beyond her physical age and is always making notes about what is happening around her - both real things and her thoughts about possibilities for future stories.

This book is a series of linked short stories - short stories about Vanessa’s relatives and her interactions with them. The characters are wonderful. Laurence as usual creates well-developed and multi-dimensional characters. The story lines of each are not complicated. They are stories of every day life but captured my interest immediately and engaged me from the get go.

As in many of the books of the Manawaka series, Laurence integrates the thoughts of the female narrator into the story line. She does so in The Bird in the House as well, but Vanessa MacLeod is a fourteen year old and most of her thoughts aren’t just thoughts - they are right out there in the open, in the real world. She makes comments. She asks questions. She rebels. Her heart breaks and then she tells everyone about it. This narrator is not a “keep all one’s thoughts inside” kind of narrator. She is “out there and living in the moment” which makes her very endearing and one of my favourite Manawaka series’ narrators. One cannot help but be captiavated by Vanessa MacLeod.

As usual, Laurence’s writing is terrific - at times direct, often lyrical, engaging, wonderful about connecting the reader with its characters and carrying the reader along with the story line.

Margaret Laurence is a stellar writer who deserves to have a greater following for her talents. She was creative and innovative long before it became popular to do so. Due to her premature passing; she stopped writing long before she shared all she had to offer. Based on the small number of books Laurence wrote and had published before she passed, she is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s great writers. It is a shame she didn’t live longer to write even more books so that people all over the world would hold her in even higher esteem - something her talents, vision, writing accomplishments and being so ahead of her time are so deserving of. 4 stars.

[klaudia katarzyna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read one short story from this collection - The Mask of the Bear - for my Canadian Literature class.

My professor loves Margaret Laurence, she says that between the two big M's of Canada - i.e. Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence - she always chooses the latter and I can see why.

At first I wasn't into the story, but once the plot became more "vibrant" I got hooked.
I feel that there is a lot to talk about in this short story, many themes to analyse - childhood, love, family relations, grief.

I think I might read the rest of the short stories in the future.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'irais même peut-être jusqu'à 4,5 je crois ! j'ai vraiment trouvé ça bien écrit, clever, et juste. Relatable in many ways.

Comme l'a dit Joan Larkin: "I am haunted by the women in Laurence's novels as if they really were alive--and not as women I've known, but as women I've been".

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House was honestly one of the best works I've read in a long time. Were it possible to give it 11 stars, I would. The writing style is very smooth, and rather unemotional considering the nature of the stories. The format of interconnected short stories featuring the same protagonist is a genius way of telling childhood stories; they don't always run in chronological order, and something about that makes you feel more connected to Vanessa. Perhaps it's that you feel less like you're watching her grow up, and more like you're remembering alongside her.
Each one of these stories is quiet, but profoundly devastating. Quiet in that the tragedies are not something heavily focussed on- they are just things that happen, they are normal. Which is also what made them so devastating.

[Julia Sapphire · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 out of 5 stars

"I went upstairs to my room. Momentarily I felt a sense of calm, almost acceptance. Rest beyond the river. I knew now what that meant. It meant Nothing. It meant only silence forever.”


Really enjoyed all the symbolism as well as the characters and their relationships.

[Ann Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of linked short stories that generally move forward in time, with a few exceptions.

I'm pretty sure I read this book decades ago, because some of the stories seem vaguely familiar, but I'm not totally sure. If I did read it back in the day, it was definitely worth returning to again. It's a well crafted and enjoyable book.

[MargaretDH · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read my first Margaret Laurence Manawaka novel when I was 21, and now here I am reading the final one at 38. I’m sorry this is my last one, and I’ll probably start again at the beginning and see how I come at them a second time around.

Laurence is so good at writing mortifications of the soul and of the flesh. She’s also a wonder at using fairly short and fine strokes to capture the upright and unbending Canadian prairie protestant and the little towns they inhabit. Her examinations of social and gendered mores are incisive. Her books are certainly transporting, and often uncomfortably so.

This is a set of linked short stories, addressing different times in Vanessa Macleod’s childhood and adolescence. Vanessa is on her way to becoming a writer, and must endure the solitary and sometimes difficult childhood of the creative.

I have a friend who (fairly) gives Canadian literature a hard time. Because the US cultural juggernaut is always threatening to overtake us, Canadian authors and publishing are subsidized, and sometimes books that likely wouldn’t get published in a more competitive market slip through. But this is really really good Canadian literature! As good as any literature anywhere! And I do think there’s something uniquely Canadian about it. I guess what I’m saying is that I think this deserves the CanLit label, in the best way possible.

If you like reading character studies about women vs. society, please do yourself a favour and read the Manawaka books.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accurate capturing of the view from childhood, blunt, confusing, inevitable. I'm surprised by how well the author made it feel like my own childhood. Impressive writing, capturing that feeling, as well as that odd melancholic echo from childhood you feel when you look back as an adult. Full of the unspoken regrets and confusion found when growing up, but faced in the unapologetic way we all must.

Don't know as it's a book to read again, but it takes only two hours, and made me want to call my mother. So.

[Pat Lilley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent book by Laurence, my favourite Canadian writer. I don’t know I missed this one for so many years. It was sitting on my bookshelf. I think it must have been my mother’s. This is the fourth entry in Laurence’s Manawaka series (along with A Jest of God, The Stone Angel, and the Diviners, the Fire Dwellers). In nine, non-sequential short stories, Laurence recounts the childhood of Vanessa, a proud and wilful girl, who loves to write stories. The characters are so complex and well-drawn, they break your heart over and over again, just like life itself.

[Meredith Russow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was beautiful in ways I’m not ready to talk about

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Bird in the House is the 4th book in a five-book series that Margaret Laurence wrote about the fictional Manitoba town of Manawaka (based on her hometown of Neepawa). It's not a "series" in the sense that one normally thinks of a series; the books are only loosely connected–each one has a different main character–and so they really stand alone. There's no need to read them in order or together.

This is a book that I think I could re-read over and over again. It's actually not a novel, but eight interconnected short stories. The stories center on the childhood of a girl who grows up to be a writer, essentially depicting the process of how a child becomes a writer.

[Lola Estelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful book! It made me nostalgic for a time and place I've never experienced. Simple yet haunting. I'm not normally one for child protagonists, but Vanessa is neither saccharine nor overly sassy/precocious. I want to write like this.

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha recordado mucho a una pelicula, "El Rio" de Jean Renoir. Una pena que Margaret Laurence no haya sido editada en castellano, una escritora inmensa a la altura de Alice Munro o Margaret Atwood.Qué buenas son las escritoras canadienses!!!!l

[Gisela · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a classic. The writing is pitch perfect, the stories all-consuming. A truly wonderful collection of short stories.

[Paxton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shes very intentional with her writting and I find it so magical. I find the book so depressing and I feel like I'm just watching an entire generation become trauamatized through it.

I liked the book and all its tradegies. I love psycho analysing the characters and how the smallest recall of events can explain or reveal so much about someone. I always feel crazy when I noticed a super SMALL thing about someone and judge them off it. Usually though, I am correct with my judgement as I am with judging the characters in the book.

I loved how this book made me feel less crazy. Good book!

[Rebeccah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Our narrator is Vanessa and the various stories are recollections of her growing up from around the ages of nine to sixteen, roughly. She is imaginative and hilarious, and her observations on her complicated family are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, and always thought-provoking. This was a nuanced look on how complex people can be and how hard it is to truly understand each other. It was very sad in places; all the characters felt so solid and real.

This was my second read from the Manawaka series, but it certainly won't be my last.

[Heather(Gibby) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the third book in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka Series (you do not need to read these in order)

It is a series of lovely connected short stories about a young girl with big dreams, growing up in a small town.

[Hayley]

read for school- I really really enjoyed this one. It resonated with me very aggressively and I saw a lot of myself in Vanessa (not always a good thing but oh well). I am a sucker for a dysfunctional family and some casual domestic fiction.

[Gill Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is for me, sadly, the last book, actually interlinking short stories, in Margaret Laurence’s wonderful and underrated Manawaka series, based on the small town Neepawa in Manitoba, Canadian when the author grew up. I cannot speak highly enough of these quiet but powerful stories which together build up a picture of a Canadian town, though both World Wars, the Depression into the latter part of the twentieth century.

The books portray life unflinchingly, always from the female perspective, and they look at all levels of society from; the relatively well off with their furniture, cherished silver and self sufficiency; to the church going bible bashing zealots, who often fail to view their fellows with compassion; to the misunderstood and down trodden indigenous Indians; to the failed marriages and mid life crises of women who have followed their husbands across Canada far from their hometowns. Laurence’s prose style is economical but very effective at putting her messages across.

This engaging book is a Bildungsroman about Vanessa MacLeod, with her mixed Irish and Scottish background, and is obviously semi autobiographical on reading about Margaret Laurence’s life history. Each chapter is complete in its own right but the time scales overlap and a picture builds up about a young girl growing up in a prairie town. It is the first in the Manawaka sequence, although I actually read it last because I had to search to find a secondhand copy.

Overall a a very affecting book and I am sad to be leaving Manawaka.

[Milly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great pleasure to read Margaret Lawrence again after many years.