Milly and Twiss are spinsters living a quiet life in rural Wisconsin. When a bird enters their house, they know they will receive visitors. A visit from an injured goldfinch brings a minivan with a mother and her children, a careless, thoughtless comment from Milly, and the dredging up of a sad story from another time that Milly remembers every day, yet hasn’t though about in years. Remembering the summer her elder cousin Bret spent with the sisters and their parents, Milly recalls her father, a man with dreams of the good life and a natural aptitude for golf, her mother, from a well-to-do family, trying to make the best life she can for her family, quietly putting up with her husband’s failed dreams. She retells the events that occurred that summer and decisions she made to try and hold her family together, events and decisions that will shape the rest of her life.
The Bird Sisters, a first novel, has an ethereal quality to it, alternating between the present and Milly and Twiss wonder through their lives, and the past, where adult decisions were made by children who would have to live with their decisions, and their effects on others, as adults. Rasmussen’s language is beautiful, her metaphors subtle, creating the private world of Milly and Twiss, inviting the reader in, but never allowing them to get too close.
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