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The Strange Bird
- A Borne Story
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's Summary
The Strange Bird - from New York Times best-selling novelist Jeff VanderMeer - expands and weaves deeply into the world of his critically acclaimed novel Borne.
The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory - she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege, and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.
But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology - satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans - all of them now simply scrambling to survive - who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.
With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne - a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.
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What listeners say about The Strange Bird
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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- Nessa Rae
- 01-06-21
Beautiful but depressing
I love the work of Jeff Vandermeer, I love Borne, Area X trilogy, and I enjoyed the The Dead Astronauts. This story was brief but I kept wondering when it would be over. It is fatally depressing, with body horror elements, dread, and the feeling of being trapped. Without spoiling anything, this story is the story of a bird with complex thoughts and desires, and she gets swept up in a storm and terrible things happen to her after that, that she describes to us along with her intense existential and physical pain. She's a character that things happen to for the most part, where transformation is hell and also freedom, though it's always transformation imposed on her by others, and she is a peripheral observer of a larger story. She is a strong consistent character who endures a lot, so I don't fault her for my feelings on this book if that makes any sense! I don't know how to feel after listening to this, though I'm sure I'll be thinking about it for a while. If you are triggered by body horror stuff, or very sensitive to depression experienced by characters in a book, I hate to say it but avoid this book because that is the majority of it. If you love Vandermeer and aren't in the two categories of people I listed it's worth a listen as a part of the Borne series with Vandermeer's writing being beautiful as always.
1 person found this helpful
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- BUSHBILL
- 02-03-18
I don't know about this one.
Witty and solid writing. Good ideas and flushing out the works build a bit but I just didn't enjoy it.
1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-04-18
Great story and narration but...
This is exactly what was needed to round out Borne and while the narrator was excellent, her voice and tone made me want to take a nap. I don't mean that I was bored but it felt like I was getting read a bedtime story as a child.
1 person found this helpful
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- Elizabeth Stotlemeyer
- 03-08-22
Annoying Narration
I've listened to a lot of novels narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, and I normally like her, but the entire narration sounds like she's about to burst into tears. I just found it annoying.
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- Colin
- 06-29-21
An Oddly Haunting Novel
A parallel story to Borne. It will stick with you if you get it. 😉
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- André Solo
- 03-11-21
Very short, not worth a credit
I was excited to get more from the world of Borne. However, this is a very short piece, more like a short novella then a sequel. The story itself is pretty interesting, and it’s nice getting more details on the world, but it quickly moves away from new explorations of The City into reprising and re-interpreting some events from the first book. Then it’s pretty much just a rush to the end. It would be a worthwhile read if you could pick it up in paper form, but as an audible, I would save the 1 credit and use it for a full length book.
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- bisrosolan
- 01-25-21
Really quiet
The story is good, but the performer has a soft voice and the sound engineering keeps it really quiet. By the time I got it turned up loud enough to hear, distortion garbled the words a bit. I am a bit hard of hearing so maybe this is fine for a normal person.
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- jacob i adams
- 11-26-20
A great addition to the Borne story
I loved this shift in perspective on the world introduced in Borne and the expansion of the backstory of the destroyed city.
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- MommaFly
- 10-18-20
Haunting and Beautiful
Loved this continuation of the Borne story and VanderMeer is a master eco-story teller. The imagery and depth of emotion he brings to animal biotech characters and the broken humans who create, hurt, and help them is poetic. Even in all the chaos there is love and beauty. Strange Bird is my favorite VanderMeer book, so far, and that is saying a lot.
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- Woody Robinson
- 12-30-19
Beautiful heart felt story
I cried at the end! It was such a beautiful story. I read Borne yesterday and just finished The Strange Bird all in same span. This was an amazing companion piece, more insight to the novel Borne, unanswered questions answered! Onto Dead Astronauts (: