Fed to Red Birds

Rijn Collins

Simon & Schuster

Otago Daily Times, May 13th 2023

Award-winning Australian short story writer Rijn Collins has a background in linguistics and a penchant for the odd and the obsessed. She is also a self-taught taxidermist and has studied the pathology of xylophagia (paper-eating) and trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling). All are on display in this, her debut novel.

Her protagonist, a young Australian woman, Elva Bloom, has travelled to Reykavíc in search of her Icelandic roots. Here she has found a place for herself, working in a shop selling Victorian arcana, studying for the national language exam, and dabbling with taxidermy.  But much as she loves her new home, she remains haunted by memories of a mother lost in childhood and the legacy of her grandfather Afi, whose beloved children’s book, the titular Fed to Red Birds, is the source of her name. It is also the focus of the OCD she is unable to outrun, despite travelling to the other side of the world.

Imbued in the magic-realism of the subarctic circle and the light and shadow of fairy tale, Fed to Red Birds depicts the isolation of mental illness with an honesty seldom seen in popular fiction. It is a story of weird and wonderful beauty.