Title: Bird Meets Cage
Author: Anyta Sunday
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 64 Pages
Category: Historical
At a Glance: Bird Meets Cage delivers an emotional punch in a small package.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: He called himself Stardust, but one of my friends told me his name was Jean. I met him during the summer I worked at the cotton candy stand when the circus came through town.
He was made of big dreams, sunshine, and raw sense of being that I’d never known existed before him. His eyes were black as mud, his lips were the same color as the cotton candy I sold, and his smile could put a solar eclipse to shame.
He was everything I wasn’t. He was the first man I ever loved, and he left without me ever telling him that the way he looked at me broke my heart.
I’m older now, and even if that circus never comes through town again, I’ll still call him Stardust.
Review: Anyta Sunday doesn’t scrimp on the emotion in Bird Meets Cage in spite of it being just sixty-four pages long. It takes some skill to finesse a heartfelt romance out of so few words, but she imparts the yearning and desire of a chance meeting wrapped in a fleeting moment in time and then weaves it into one perfectly heart-felt love affair.
The time period is post-World War II, the setting a traveling circus where Sunday captures just enough of the sights and sounds to set her stage without needing much page time to do it. Seventeen-year-old Nathan is working the cotton candy machine in a vendor stall and dreaming about the possibility of playing his trumpet in the circus—but only for as long as it’s in town. His one true fantasy, however, is Blue, a trick rider in the show and the man Nathan thinks of as Stardust. In turn, Blue dubs Nathan Floss—after the candy floss he spins—and it’s through longing, Floss’s eighteenth birthday, one night of pure and uninhibited passion, and the regret of an inevitable goodbye that Stardust and Floss pass like ill-timed ships in the night.
Anyta Sunday uses substantial time leaps to progress her story, but not to its detriment as much as to my longing to have had those moments on-page. The narrative remains with Nathan during these long spans, time during which he grows up, cements a friendship with Danny, a circus clown, and endures familial hardships. Among it all, though, there is never a dampening of Nathan’s feelings for his first, lost, and only love—only trying to move on from him—and the tone of Sunday’s voice captures the melancholy and yearning perfectly.
And the final reunion, ah, it is the stuff of romance, when love strikes true and for always, and clarifies the difference between being caged in and Blue finding a home in someone he doesn’t want to leave. Bird Meets Cage delivers an emotional punch in a small package..
You can buy Bird Meets Cage here:
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