She often invokes the caged birds she keeps as pets. Instead of marriage, she daydreams of a life as an adventurer, a wart charmer (though it’s not entirely clear what a wart charmer actually does), a monk, a minstrel, or even one of the villagers, who she thinks have far more choice over who they marry. Catherine foils his plans by pulling pranks on her suitors when they visit, most notably setting the outdoor privy, or outhouse, on fire. These duties are meant to make her a good wife, and her father actively seeks a potential husband for her. Along with detailing the day-to-day duties she loathes and must endure, including sewing, embroidering, and making “remedies” to doctor those around her, the reader follows Catherine’s interactions with the villagers her father presides over. Though it was rare for even noble women to have kept diaries at this time, Catherine does so, keeping record of her daily life. Birdy) is the daughter of a minor nobleman in Britain who keeps a diary at the urging of her brother, a monk.

Set in 1290, thirteen-year-old Catherine (a.k.a. I only decided to give the book a try once I had taken a closer look to see that the girl was actually holding a rope attached to a bucket of water, about to be dumped on her suitor’s head.Ĭatherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman is a young adult novel published in 1994. In the background, I saw a man playing a lute, presumably her suitor. My first memory of the cover was that it seemed old-fashioned: a fair-skinned young woman with piercing blue eyes who stared just beyond the viewer conspiratorially. I first saw it propped up on a shelf at a Scholastic book fair back in the early 2000s. Canon Fodder is an ongoing series of essays where writers talk about the books they’ve held close relationships with in their lives and why those books deserve a second read by a broader literary audience.Īs an eleven-year-old, I knew Catherine, Called Birdy by its cover.

Catherine birdy book