Looking for a summer read that’ll make your heart both soar and ache? Look no further than Postcards for a Songbird by Rebekah Crane and check out an exclusive excerpt from the novel right now!
In this upcoming contemporary YA novel, the main character, Wren Plumley, has dealt with her fair share of hardships, teenage and otherwise. When her mother walked out on her family, there was no way to know just how much that would affect her relationships with others. But if there’s one thing that Wren knows for sure, it’s that everyone eventually leaves.
Like her namesake, Wren finds comfort in seeing the world from a bird’s eye view perspective. When her life on the ground just doesn’t seem to make sense, she simply switches views.
In the exclusive excerpt below, meet Lizzie, Wren’s sister, and Chief, their father, the two people in her life who both keep her grounded and push her to seek higher ground.
Here’s your first look at an excerpt from Rebekah Crane’s ‘Postcards for a Songbird’!
Chapter 1
Bird on a Wire
When life isn’t working, take another perspective. Lizzie’s go-to is handstands. She flings herself against the wall and flops there like an upside-down dead fish. Somehow she manages to hold herself up. And then she usually says something like, “Imagine if we could walk upside down. Then the sky would be our playground. Wouldn’t that be nice, Songbird? The sky as our playground.”
And I say something like, “Wouldn’t we just float around everywhere?”
“Exactly.” Lizzie responds like I’ve asked the perfect question, even though we both know she wishes I had more of her imagination. She nods, her long brown hair dangling to the ground. Her face blooms with red, the blood rushing to her head, but she talks like she doesn’t care. “We could dance on the sunrise and float to the moon.”
When I tell her that her face is about to pop like a balloon, she comes down from her handstand.
“God, it feels good to be back on the earth,” she says.
“I thought you wanted to dance on the sunrise.”
“I realized something, being upside down.”
“What?” I ask.
“Gravity is like a parent. It holds you even when you don’t want it to.”
Not all parents. But I keep that to myself.
When I want to take a new perspective, I prefer the top of the garage instead of a handstand. I’ve tried to do what Lizzie does, just fling myself upside down and trust I can hold my weight, but I always worry that I’ll fall on my head. Lizzie is the only person I know who can float on clouds and dance with the sunrise, because Lizzie is made up of magical things—the stuff in the atmosphere you can’t see until it lights up and becomes a shooting star.
Up on the garage, I hug my knees to my chest and perch, like a bird. From here I can look around at all the rooftops in the neighborhood. Lizzie asked me once what I see from way up here. I told her most people in the neighborhood need to clean their gutters.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said.
“Why?”
“Have you seen the way some of the people walk around this neighborhood all clogged? The inside always comes out, Songbird. No matter how hard you try to ignore it.”
Chief is the worst offender. His gutters are so clogged he doesn’t remember what it’s like to breathe without pain. Most days he’s so stopped up that words get stuck in his throat and he has to force them back down with a deep swallow.
The first time Chief saw me on the roof of the garage, he asked that I “please refrain from breaking any bones or smashing my head.” If Lizzie is freedom, Chief is handcuffs and locked doors.
“All it takes is one slip of the foot,” he said.
“You can’t live worried about slipping, Chief,” I said. “Better to have the confidence you can catch yourself when it happens.”
“You know that’s not true, Wren. It’s better to just stay away from danger. Stop talking like your sister.”
I love when he compares me to Lizzie. It rarely happens.
“And stop calling me Chief. I’m your dad.”
“Okay, Chief.”
His move is to put his hands on his hips, like a police officer. I’m pretty sure if you looked him up at Sacred Heart Hospital in Boise, he’d be the first recorded case of a child born with a mustache and a badge. Chief has been a police officer his entire career. He currently works the graveyard shift for the Spokane Police Department. He claims to like the action of nighttime. I think he just prefers to sleep during the day, when everyone else is awake. It keeps him properly detached from a normal life and the things people do in a normal life, like eat cereal in the morning and kiss each other before bed at night.
But I understand his choice. If all you ever see is people at their worst moments—broken, bruised, drugged, dead—humanity becomes the enemy. A thing to be tamed and tasered, not loved.
Lizzie is the one who started calling him Chief.
“Why not just call me Officer?” he asked. “Officer Plumley.”
“Because it’s boring,” she said. “It’s too long, and it doesn’t sing. Don’t you want your name to carry a better tune?”
“But it’s accurate.”
“Accuracy is overrated. I’d rather be creative. There’s nothing creative in calling you Officer.”
Chief’s outward annoyance was really inward love. Sometimes love does that—it presents itself cloaked in something darker, in odd shapes, in tears and groans and messes, because just like the rest of us, love is afraid to be itself. Sometimes to catch love, you have to hold it to the ground, strip it down, wash the dirt away, and wait. But love will eventually surface to breathe. Most of the time.
It makes sense that Chief covers up his love. Fourteen years ago a piece of his heart walked out the door and never came back. He has to fill the hole with something. We all do.
Lizzie fills hers with stories.
Chief fills his with work.
I fill my mine with blame.
Leaving does a strange thing to those who remain. It starts with one—one person who walks out the door. And a piece goes missing. But that empty space follows us, creating more holes. There was no mom to bring cupcakes to my class on my birthday in first grade, and so no one was celebrated. The day passed as any other. And more pieces went missing. The school didn’t have my mom’s email address, so I was left off class party lists. And a piece slips away. A school play. A science fair. Empty chairs where a mom would have sat and cheered. Until one day in junior high school, I was forgotten. I became like vapor—barely felt and rarely seen.
But Lizzie kept me from being lonely.
Love made Lizzie, but by the time I came around, it was practically gone from our house. All that was left were ghosts and the faint echo of what once was. I was made from discarded scraps of love—the pieces left out in the rain, like a rusted lawn chair someone brings inside for just one night, hoping it will salvage the whole house.
But people leave anyway, because small scraps of love, left unsown, blow away easily in the wind. And yet the rusty, weighted chair remains.
Some people are just born different. But not an intriguing different. A lonely different. An invisible different. A forgotten different. Even my mom knew it. Chief won’t admit it, but I’m sure I’m the reason she left. I’m the piece that broke it all.
When life isn’t working, take another perspective. Life on the ground hasn’t been so good lately. Chief doesn’t want me on the roof, but it’s what birds do. We balance ourselves on the tiniest wires, and when the wind blows, we see if we can stay steady. You’d think we’d learn our lesson and find a more stable place to sit and watch the world below, but I see more birds on wires than anywhere else. It’s in our nature. We’re drawn to the edge.
And even when birds seem to be falling toward the ground, somehow we catch ourselves before we hit the pavement. Right before we lose it all, we find the strength to soar skyward again.
About ‘Postcards for a Songbird’ by Rebekah Crane
Everyone eventually leaves Wren Plumley. First it was her mother, then her best friend, and then her sister. Now living with only her cop father and her upended dreams, Wren feels stranded, like a songbird falling in a storm.
When Wilder, a sickly housebound teen, moves in next door, Wren finally finds what she’s always wanted—a person who can’t leave. But a chance meeting with Luca, the talkative, crush-worthy boy in her driver’s ed class, has Wren wondering if maybe she’s too quick to push people away. Soon, Wren finds herself caught between the safety of a friendship and a love worth fighting for.
Wren starts to dream again. But when postcards begin arriving from her sister, Wren must ultimately confront why her mother left fourteen years before and why her sister followed in her footsteps. For her new life to take flight, Wren will have to reconcile the heartbreaking beauty of lost dreams and the beautiful heartbreak of her new reality.
Postcards for a Songbird by Rebekah Crane will be available on August 6, 2019, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, or Indiebound. Also, don’t forget to add it to your Goodreads “to read” list!
Fan of our book coverage? Why not join our Hypable Books Facebook group!
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.