Elva loves Iceland for many reasons – the epic landscape of gods and volcanoes, weather that’s the polar opposite of her home in Australia, and the fact that it’s where her mother might have gone back to when she disappeared. Iceland is where Elva’s beloved grandfather – the famous children’s book author – lives in a remote village and where the beings that haunt her imagination reside.
Elva is interested in the odd things people make: Victorian collectibles, old spells, taxidermy, fairy tales; the weird, the wonderful and the sometimes macabre. She’s got a few quirks of her own that she’s (mainly) keeping under control. Except one.
Working in a shop of curiosities, studying at an Icelandic language school, Elva begins to explore her obsessions, and when her grandfather suffers a stroke, they threaten to overtake her. Then she meets Remy, a painter who’s got some secrets of his own…
In her captivating debut, Rijn Collins has created a beautifully evocative portrait of an enchanted mind in an enchanting place – a story of everyday magic, both dark and light; of families and the shadows they can cast; of the delights and dangers of the imagination.
Despite being grounded in realism, Fed to Red Birds has an underlying sense of strangeness, like that of the Icelandic fairy tales that Elva is obsessed with. Collins laces the unexpected and otherworldly into the everyday life of her protagonist effortlessly and convincingly, and I found myself eagerly reading on for the next eccentric turn.
I was struck by the novel’s enchanting setting, and the complete sensory immersion that Collins achieves. It’s clear that Collins has spent time living in the bitter cold landscape of her fiction’s setting. The freezing cold of the Icelandic streets, the buoyancy of the water at the local swimming pool, the creepy, crowded, watchful warmth of the Cabinet of Curiosities, where Elva works. Fed to Red Birds transports you to remote corners of both the world and the human heart: Elva comes to Iceland to escape, and we readers experience that same escapism in Collins’ wonderfully rich prose.
The characters are contemporary and relatable – particularly young Elva, whose simultaneous feistiness and guardedness make her extremely likable, in her flawed way. While the story leans into dark themes, there is a comforting warmth in Collins’ meticulous prose, and in the sincere relationships that Elva forms with her Icelandic friends, colleagues and classmates. The novel reads like a fireside glass of red wine on a cold winter’s evening.
Fed to Red Birds is a quietly haunting novel that leads us to ponder our histories and genealogies, and how we hold onto the past through our obsessions and compulsions. The novel is a tender ode to the wonder in the macabre, and to facing those deep, unexplainable parts of ourselves that we often guard tightly in order to survive. It is a story about truth and acceptance, trust and vulnerability, and the beauty to be found in the shadows.
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