The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor

This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery O’Connor’s childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness. With its memorable opening line, “Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens,” the book celebrates her fascination with life’s peculiarities—and death. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhu’s illustrations align with the book’s focus on eccentricity...The thoughtful design—at 12 inches square, as outsized as its subject—includes a type chosen because its designer, like O’Connor, had a love for drawing birds. A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision. —Kirkus Reviews

Like the best children’s books, Alznauer’s words recognize the cleverness of their audience; they never condescend or talk down. Zhu’s work reminds us that illustrations shouldn’t flatten the world either. Fluent in the grammar of both abstract and representational art, her work is full of dimension and color, symmetry and asymmetry, life and breath. The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor holds potential enough to inspire its youngest readers, and to stoke the smoldering embers of curiosity in its oldest. —Plough

Like O’Connor, this gangly art object of a book tracing her first forays as a writer to an outsize fascination with the chickens in her childhood backyard is a “strange bird,” in the most wondrous of ways. “There was something about strangeness,” a young O’Connor realized after her trained bantam drew fame, “that made people sit up and look.” Alznauer pairs a grounded, authentic vernacular with a lyricism that takes flight, while Zhu’s depiction of odd human proportions against brilliant brushstroke plumage stuns. -The New York Times

"In pitch-perfect harmony, writer Amy Alznauer and artist Ping Zhu honor the life of the prominent Georgia author and her affinity for the feathered species. Zhu’s painted scenes wow the eyes with dazzling color, fiddling marvelously with perspective and filling super-large, thick-stock pages. By studying something closely, such as the chickens and peacocks on her Milledgeville farm, O’Connor could always find “some hidden strangeness, making it beautiful and funny and sad all at the same time.” (Which could also describe her fiction.) This nuanced and multilayered effort includes extra biographical material. For art lovers." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Amy Alznauer traces the writer’s gothic style to her Catholic childhood in Georgia...As Ms. Alznauer writes: “In that brief moment of fame, Flannery had a revelation. People didn’t want to see any old chicken; they wanted a weird one. There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look.”There’s a responsive touch of weirdness in Ping Zhu’s artwork for this lovely book, with its glowing colors, bold shapes, and proportions that shift between realistic and outlandish. The bright plumage in a final soaring image suggests what a strange bird O’Connor was herself." -The Wall Street Journal