![]() From the vantage point of his flights he sees, more clearly than the major, what a mess humans routinely make, when they interfere with the natural world and each other. The use of a pigeon narrator in a dead-serious story could have come off as a gimmick. The novelist, with admirable restraint of her anger at a war born of greed and arrogance by politicians and generals, unfolds with patient attention to the characters and their impossible mission, what real courage is. Rooney creates warm and empathetic portraits of them. Rooney’s plot delves imaginatively into a historical incident all the characters, real names preserved, including the bird’s, are based on actual soldiers. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, is coming out from Texas Review Press in September 2022. It’s quite a leap, and a beautifully successful one, from modern New York City to the trenches of the Argonne Forest near the end of World War I and the alternating voices of a soldier and a bird. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. ![]() ![]() ![]() Rooney is a multitalented, nimble writer, moving easily among literary genres and styles. ![]()
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