West Virginia
Review by Walter Cummins
My fine feathered friends. That phrase, dating back to the 1500s, occurred to me after I read Terese Svoboda’s novel Roxy and Coco. The title sisters and several of their harpy fellows are potentially fine as they shed occasional feathers and eventually expose their full-feathered glory. Dr Seuss used the phrase as the title of an illustrated children’s book, but this novel is hardly for youngsters or comic, although it is very clever and full of wonder. That’s Svoboda’s impressive feat, making her readers—at least this one—believe her harpies are credible and complex in their interactions with the human world.
From its opening sentences Roxy and Coco is propelled by inventive energy. Within a few paragraphs I was convinced by the persuasive existence of two winged sister harpies who disguise their suet-eating avian roots to function as familiar beings. How does Svoboda pull that off so quickly? Coco, the narrating sister, rapid in wit, insight, and humor, conveys a convincing authority through her incisive prose.
The sisters—Roxy in her beautiful blondness, Coco darkhaired, both accepted by humans as members of our species—are employed as social workers, Coco especially with a mission: “If we can just get humans to stop abusing their children, maybe they’ll stop abusing each other, and the planet. It’s my planet too.” And it’s not just the harm of children. She hopes to use her powers to make humans overcome their baser instincts, even if it means having dropped the worst of us from fatal heights in Paris.
The opening chapter, in which she acts to save an abused infant, reveals her avian identity through a matter-of-fact description of her wings. First, “I step into the center of the room and shrug off my jacket so my wings—span eight feet, tipped with claws—cut off the window light.” Then as her work supervisor, Stewie, is about to enter the room: “My wings zzzt like a convertible closing between my shoulders, my jacket’s back on by the time he walks in.” As if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Coco takes her physical characteristics for granted. She is a realist about her nature and about the flaws of humans, often to the point of cynicism. She’s also a worrier, at the start of the novel about saving the infant and about her sister’s, Roxy’s, naïve longing for their co-worker Tim. Coco’s doubts about romance lead her to explain the distinction between human and harpy sexuality:
Roxy’s interest in romance is awfully human. With harpies, there’s none of that dancing around like other birds when they mate, and is there ever any hand-holding afterward, any split-the-rent-and-save-up-for-the-kid’s-college? Nope, none of the love stuff. Romance is messy and time-consuming and irrational; instinct is automatic. Ba-boom. Over. The male harpy swoops down and tups us from behind, then he’s gone. That makes them hard to ID, even for us.
This description typifies Svoboda’s ability to make her central characters physically real by capturing their distinctive nature with an implied human comparison through a voice that also conveys Coco’s feelings about her species and its connection to our common world. All this is accomplished in a few opening pages. Svoboda establishes this reality with a sureness that makes whatever happens next unquestionably believable.
Coco is offering a great sacrifice by existing in the human realm and assuming the onuses of saving its inhabitants from the consequences of their cruelties: “I relax into the air eventually, I lean into the current, not flapping, not diving, the upside of the earth palm-open under me. I forget, every time, the thrill and beauty of soaring. I must always forget or I’d never spend ten minutes on earth.”
Coco’s isn’t the only voice of the novel, her perspective not the only source of information, although it hovers behind all the third-person chapters that depict activities Coco does not know until all of the human scheming explodes in the wild happenings of the final scenes, when Coco finally confronts all the burdens that are hers because of who and what she is.
The primary villain is a rich woman named Reagan, who hires agents to track Roxy as a specimen to be captured for a huge aviary containing countless bird species and the rarest, most valuable bird eggs, with Roxy as her potential prize exhibit.
Who will save Roxy, if she can be saved? Who among the seeming human presences is actually a harpy? As Coco explains, “Harpies aren’t going to take time off to fly in for just a head count. You need a big celebration or a real emergency to call a gathering. Even so, not all the harpies come to these parties, though they will always try, since they’re so infrequent and we’re so few now. It’s too dangerous.”
Yet in a final confrontation Reagan and her humans are routed, then Roxy’s egg hatches to give birth to her replica. Humans gone, the aviary fills with harpies, including those initially disguised as humans. Stewie, now outed, sings, “Hope is a thing with feathers.”
In another familiar phrase, also tracked back to the 1500s, “Birds of a feather flock together.”
These are indeed our fine feathered friends, their adventures gripping as they face severe human-made dangers—gripping because Terese Svoboda has made what happens to such beings meaningful and important.
