Nightjar

Katya Balen’s books run off emotions and this story is full of hurt, anger and frustration for all the apparent quiet of its setting. Noah and his mother live in a flat. She sews for a living, wedding dresses but also tiny gowns for stillborn babies; Noah’s passion is bird-watching and his bedroom is full of his life drawings, and sometimes a box in the corner with an injured bird he’s nursing back to health. The stillness of their lives is broken when Noah’s father flies in from New York to attend his son’s Bar Mitzvah. Neither understand the things that matter to the other and tensions rise first on a walk in the country when Noah finds an injured nightjar and insists on taking it home to nurse, and then over a pizza dinner when Noah’s dad relates his own experience with an injured animal and the very different decision he made. Noah can’t forgive his father for what he decided to do, but when he wants to return the nightjar to the countryside he needs his father’s help. This second outing sees them reconciled, each finding the understanding and grace to acknowledge that the other’s decision was correct. ‘These words feel so big even when there aren’t many of them’, says Noah on their conversation, a sentiment which can be applied to the whole book. Written for dyslexia specialists Barrington Stoke, the text is perfectly simple in terms of sentence structure and composition, even while acknowledging the shadowy contradictions of relationships, or in Noah’s words, ‘there’s black and white and night and day and sometimes it’s all mixed up.’ For those who don’t yet need to think about the complexities of love and live, this is also a superb animal story, in which a boy saves a wild creature and thereby heals himself. Nightjar features some of the characters in Balen’s earlier Barrington Stoke novella Birdsong and is equally skilfully told.