FLY AWAY HOME

We get that a memoir about a woman who spends a life-changing year observing Toronto’s bird life might not be the most riveting pitch (unless you’re a birdwatcher, in which case you’re already three chapters deep and feverishly comparing author Kyo Maclear’s list of sightings with your own and driving to the spot where she got a rare glimpse of a peregrine falcon on Sunnyside Beach one winter’s day). And while, yes, Birds Art Life is a memoir of Maclear’s experience following a birdwatching musician around the 6ix as a means of breaking out of a personal rut, it’s also a book for anyone searching for magic in the mundane or delight in the daily grind. It’s perhaps most for those whose souls perk up at majorly Tweet-worthy (sorry) sentences like “[Birding] allowed me to exist in a simple continuity, amid a river of birds and people and hours. The stubborn anxiety that filled the rest of my life was calmed for as long as I was standing in the river.”