She sounds very much like a teenager today. She wants freedom – as she knows it – and a choice in her life. She hates fleas and the thought of marrying the kind of men her father keeps considering as potential husbands for her. She hates sewing, she hates embroidery, she hates standing and stirring cauldrons of nasty smelling soap.

It shows her initially rebelling against the standard activities that would take up most of the day of a girl in her position. But then lots of times Birdy doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong even when her mother,her nurse and the beast, aka her father, see it otherwise. It’s funny and honest in that Birdy doesn’t try to make herself out to be better than she’s actually behaved. But I also acknowledge that if a young woman who might act and think like Birdy actually existed in England in the year 1290, she would have been one in a million.īirdy’s diary faithfully records a year of her life beginning when she was fourteen. I immediately fell for Catherine, called Birdy. Since it has such a positive reputation and was a Newbery Honor book, I felt confident that it would be worth my time to seek out and try. The title of this book rang a bell when I saw it for sale. Jayne B Reviews / Book Reviews coming-of-age / England / Historical / medieval / YA classic / Young-Adult 16 Comments “Birdy starting to realize that everybody around her is also trapped in their own sort of proverbial cage and experiencing their own challenges with the society that they live in was a really beautiful thing to watch Bella play.SeptemREVIEW: Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman “In terms of how she matured, something that is in the book that we tried to bring out more this idea of her starting to understand that other people are in pain,” Dunham said. Her father Lord Rollo, who originally ‘sells’ her to Shaggy Beard, tracks down his carriage and fights Shaggy Beard to win Birdy back.īirdy dutifully records these events of her life in a journal, asked by her monk brother Edward (Archie Renaux) to do so in the hope that she would mature and become more learned The film ends with Birdy’s escape from Shaggy Beard as well, but not because he dies. Birdy is happy at the end of the book because she feels she will get along better with the son. In Cushman’s book, Birdy ultimately escapes her last suitor who she calls Shaggy Beard, because he dies, but his son marries her in place of the older, gross man.

‘Catherine Called Birdy’ Review: Lena Dunham’s Modern Sensibilities Clash With Medieval Coming-of-Age Tale

Catherine called birdy by karen cushman