Books

Listing the elements found in Joyce Hinnefeld's debut novel makes it sound deceptively trendy. There's a mother-daughter story, eco-terrorism, a strong women's friendship theme, autism and the terrorist attack on 9/11. But In Hovering Flight is more than that. It's rich in many ways, and its themes run deep.

At the center is the love story of Addie and Tom Kavanagh. Brought together in the spring of 1965 by a fascination with birds – yes, birds! – they become lovers when she is a student in Tom's class at Burnham College in Pennsylvania. Tom is a charismatic figure, a handsome Irish immigrant who knows his ornithology, but also recites poetry in class and plays the fiddle. Addie loses her virginity to him, just as his marriage to another woman is eroding.

Almost as much as she loves Tom, Addie is passionate about observing and sketching birds. Together, they create a ground-breaking book, The Prosody of Birds, which combines her drawings with his scansions of birdsong.

That's just the tip of the story. With the birth of their daughter Scarlet (named after the scarlet tanager), Addie becomes increasingly troubled by environmental pollution that threatens not only her beloved birds, but people, as well. She becomes a zealot.

The challenge of making Addie's new extremism believable may be the most difficult task Ms. Hinnefeld faced in writing this book. She does not entirely succeed. It's hard to accept that this young woman would become so changed by the writings of Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold and others, that she would take a more and more active part in pro-environment protests, going repeatedly to jail for her beliefs, and protect a young arsonist who appeared to be on her side.

Fortunately, Ms. Hinnefeld makes the novel so interesting and intricate that you read on, despite doubts you might have about verisimilitude. The other principal characters in the novel (Tom, Scarlet and Addie's friends from college, Lou and Cora) are completely believable, and their support of Addie makes her somehow easier to take, as she replaces live birds with dead ones and wonder with anger and regret.

The book is beautifully set at the Jersey Shore and in Pennsylvania, with ample attention to birdlife.

Backing up from Addie's death by cancer in 2002, the novel opens tongue-in-cheek. Addie had claimed a sighting of a Cuvier's Kinglet, a bird not seen in 200 years. No one else saw the bird, and Tom had not contested her sighting. The narrator points out, however, that "there are reasons to doubt both him and Addie." They want the land where the bird was supposedly sighted to be spared from development.

Humor mixes with sadness as Scarlet and Tom deal with Addie's outlandish, illegal plans for her burial, and put the body temporarily into a refrigerated seafood truck for safe-keeping. "Scarlet held her mother's hand for a while, but eventually that felt forced to her, as though she were trying to play the role of the grieving daughter instead of actually being one."

Scarlet, a poet, treats Addie's life story as a memoir, and begins to write it. This highly original novel makes interesting points about love and life, while tracing a daughter's debt to her unusual mother.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

Joyce Hinnefeld

(Unbridled Books, $24.95)

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