Book Review: The Bluebird and the Sparrow

A Fair Trade Book (so buy it now, while it's still one!)

Title: The Bluebird and the Sparrow

Author: Janette Oke

Date: 1995

Publisher: Bethany House

ISBN: 1-55660-612-0

Length: 251 pages

Quote: "You wait until you see your new sister. She's such a beautiful girl."

And with that non-answer to little Berta's anxiety about their mother, their loving father sets Berta up for a lifetime of resenting baby Glenna.

What you'll like: One of the very sweet, sex-free, historical novels that are more about character development than romance, but manage a happy romantic ending, for which Janette Oke is famous. (She's written more than seventy of them...and she started late; I remember when Love Comes Softly was new.) 

Also, it has an international feeling. The setting is somewhere on the Great Plains of North America, but is it in the U.S. or Canada? Oke was born in Canada but has lived in both countries, and wrote a lot of novels that let readers imagine them taking place on whichever side of the border they prefer.

What I didn't like: One-dimensional Lifetime Channel character development--and romance. I can believe that something like this happened, and that some minister or counsellor remembered it the way Oke tells it. I can't believe Oke is telling us what really happened.

Berta has no talent, no vocation, very few relationships, few real interests. She wants love, yes, but if love were all she wanted in life, would she have done so well for so long without it? In real life, heterosexual people who can choose to stay single and celibate usually have a talent or vocation into which they direct the energy that would otherwise be taken up by romance. In the case studies in popular psychology books, the real passion is, like the person's real name, likely to remain private.

Although they look very much alike, Berta thinks Glenna is much prettier and more lovable than Berta is. That happens in real life. I've known several people who, as I do, rated a sibling much better looking than they were. I've not noticed it blighting any of those people's lives, the way other factors that were noticeable in the story of Glenna's birth seem to blight Berta's life. During the peak of selfconsciousness shortly after puberty, a lot of people in search of words for their hormonal anxieties do choose words like "Some other person X is so gorgeous and I'm so ugly and awkward and half-grown." Usually by age twenty this perception has matured into something like "I wish I had X's [insert feature] but I'll get by." Or the self-serving bias finds some other way to kick in. There's something liberating about saying, "I act, model, sing, host/ess, tour-guide, [insert name of job always awarded to reasonably good-looking young people]...but my sister/brother is really good-looking."

But let's say Berta is not just your typical sibling who inherited Grandma's chin, Grandpa's nose, or some other feature the other sibling was spared; she's the one who becomes a psychological case because she's managed to convince herself that she's ugly and unlovable. Not merely a sparrow to the sibling's bluebird; a warthog. I can suspend disbelief in that. Berta really has shrunk herself down to a psychological case history. Not only her relationships to her family, but her entire outlook on life and work have been dominated by this misbelief that she's ugly and unlovable. She has no saving talent to distract her from this painful belief. No-talents really are hard to love. Nevertheless people like Berta; she's offered a job, and she's competent. I find that harder to swallow.

In real life a resume like Berta's doesn't go with the attitude toward work that Oke seems to want us to accept as being Berta's: "I don't want a job, I want to be a full-time housewife, but I'll have to do a job, because I am a warthog." People who hold that belief don't get permanent full-time jobs in libraries. Too many people who are more pleasant to work with want those jobs.

Berta's work history suggests a different set of beliefs about self and work, something like, "I want to be independent and live alone. I'm not really passionate about books as such, but I like managing my own work day and might as well manage a library as a store or office." A lot of people feel that way, and if we don't think long and hard about marrying anybody, we should. Two reasonably independent people can have a beautiful partnership. One independent person and one clingy, needy person...

Berta doesn't need a husband, but seeing her mother and the senior librarian grow senile in similar ways apparently convinces her that--what? that celibacy does not prevent aging? Also, no doubt, being alive at a period when war has made any able-bodied young man a bit of a trophy persuades her to take the one life has handed to her. I don't believe Berta's initial refusal and subsequent acceptance of marriage reflects her awareness that she is lovable. I can believe Berta was a typical member of a generation in which young women were instructed to reject the first few proposals just to prove the man's sincerity. I can believe she might even have developed a fear of childbirth as a result of being in the house when Glenna was born. I can even believe that, since her admirer is an old schoolmate whom she didn't like when they were children, she wants to make sure he's learned better manners. But we're not shown any of these reasonable thoughts running through Berta's mind; just more of her lingering-adolescent self-esteem problem.

I suppose it may have happened, somewhere, that some emotionally abusive church group somewhere browbeat someone into believing s/he was unlovable and someone else into believing s/he needed to offer love to this unlovable person as an act of self-sacrifice. That might have happened--but a marriage proposal between a couple like that wouldn't sound like a romantic happy ending.

At a less extreme level, of course, I can believe that a courting couple enjoy negating each other's insecurities. "You're not a 'little kid' any more." "You look better than your sister does now." Etc. ad infinitum. But Oke seems to want us to believe that the story is about Berta's learning how to accept and express love, and that's what the story does not give us. Instead it gives us a matched pair of misbeliefs: (1) that accepting love means marriage, and (2) that for someone who's maximized personal space and minimized emotional attachments all her life, learning to express love is a matter of saying, once, that she wants to be loved. Neither of these beliefs is true; both do harm.

Oke wanted credit for writing novels that showed how Christians' character development allowed Christians to experience True Love instead of mere infatuation. Some of her novels meet that standard--see Dana's Valley. I think this one falls short. Publishers read Love Comes Softly and said "Can you give us forty more romances like this one?" and Oke pounded them out as fast as she could, all in a pleasant readable style, but some more realistic than others.

The Bluebird and the Sparrow is not a bad read, though, if you're looking for a sweet wholesome romance or a complete collection of this super-seller author's novels. It's a Fair Trade Book; if you buy it here, $5 per book + $5 per package (two of these thickish novels plus a skinny picture book, or books, for the children would fit in one $5 package) + $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Oke or a charity of her choice.