Blythe Young—a wannabe Texas princess, a heroine as plucky, driven, and desperate as Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp—is plummeting precipitously from up- to downstairs, banging her head on every step of the Austin social ladder as she falls. Not unlike the country as a whole, Blythe has surrendered to a multitude of dubious moral choices and is now facing the disastrous consequences: bankruptcy, public humiliation, a teensy fondness for the pharmaceuticals, and no Pap smear for ten years. But worst of all, she is forced to move back into the fleabag co-op boardinghouse where she lived when she was a student at the University of Texas. Though Blythe cares much more about the ravaged state of her nails, and how to get the ingredients for Code Warrior—Blythe’s proprietary blend of Stoli, Ativan, and Red Bull that keeps everything in focus—her soul is hanging in the balance. Only when she is in danger of losing the one friend who’s been her true moral center is she ready to face her sins and make amends. And her penance is merciless: she must find a way to lure her former socialite friends into the tofu tenement she has been reduced to. Little does Blythe know that the ensuing collision between the pierced, tattooed, and dreadlocked inhabitants and the pampered, Kir-sipping socialites offers the only hope of finding a way out of her moral quagmire. Funny, fast-paced, sharp-eyed, an old-fashioned morality tale with an appropriately twenty-first-century ending, How Perfect Is That is a comic triumph of a novel.

How Perfect Is That

Literature & Fiction

Bird, Sarah

Humor & Satire

KNOPF

From the widely praised author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy, a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking about a single mom and her seventeen-year-old daughter learning how to let go in that precarious moment before college empties the nest. In The Gap Year, told with perfect pitch from both points of view, we meet Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant extraordinaire, a divorcée still secretly carrying a torch for the ex who dumped her, a suburban misfit who’s given up her rebel dreams so her only child can get a good education. We also learn the secrets of Aubrey Lightsey, tired of being the dutiful, grade-grubbing band geek, ready to explode from wanting her “real” life to begin, trying to figure out love with boys weaned on Internet porn. When Aubrey meets Tyler Moldenhauer, football idol–sex god with a dangerous past, the fuse is lit. Late-bloomer Aubrey metastasizes into Cam’s worst silent, sullen teen nightmare, a girl with zero interest in college. Worse, on the sly Aubrey’s in touch with her father, who left when she was two to join a celebrity-ridden nutball cult. As the novel unfolds—with humor, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and penetrating insights about love in the twenty-first century—the dreams of daughter, mother, and father chart an inevitable, but perhaps not fatal, collision . . .

The Gap Year

“A GEM, POLISHED AND FACETED IN A WAY THAT PULLED ME INTO THE HEART OF IT WITH THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. . . . Important, touching, meaningful, and uplifting.” –JEANNE RAY Chicago Tribune After a year away at college, military brat Bernadette Root has come “home” to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to spend the summer with her bizarre yet comforting clan. Ruled by a strict, regimented Air Force Major father, but grounded in their mother’s particular brand of humor, Bernie’s family was destined for military greatness during the glory days of the mid-’50s. But in Base life, where an unkempt lawn is cause for reassignment, one fateful misstep changed the Roots’ world forever. Yet the family’s silence cannot keep the wounds of the past from reemerging . . . nor can the memory fade of beloved Fumiko, the family’s former maid, whose name is now verboten. And the secrets long ago covered up in classic military style–through elimination and denial–are now forcing their way to the surface for a return engagement.

The Yokota Officers Club: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

United States

Random House Publishing Group

The sorority sisters of Alamo House at the University of Texas may be at comic odds with each other, but at least they have one thing in common: They all hate the fraternity rats across the street, the Sigma Upsilon Kappas—aka the SUKs. But amid the collegiate turmoil, Alamo House is also the scene of an extraordinary, endearing friendship among three women: Mary Jo, hilariously confused about life and love but determined to get both right; Fayrene, flushed with freedom after her escape from Baptist Waco; and Collie, party girl and self-proclaimed guide to the ways of the world. Together they embark on a roller coaster of escapades that changes them all—and galvanizes Alamo House into an all-out counterattack against the SUKs. The result is infectious, side-splitting fun sure to convince everyone that Mary Jo, Collie, and Fayrene are the best southwestern mixture since tequila, lime, and salt.

Alamo House (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Ballantine Books

Gretchen Griner is an underpaid, underappreciated photographer for the Austin (that’s Texas) Grackle, part-time lover of Peter Overton Treadwell III (known as “Trout”), and major consumer of Cup O’ Soup. That is, until she meets Lizzie Potts—otherwise known as Viveca Lamoureaux, romance writer extraordinaire. Lizzie has a plan for Gretchen’s life—and it includes Lizzie’s brother Gus. But Gretchen has her own plan, and it does not feature a “wispy goon” named Gus. Of course, fate also has a plan for Gretchen, and it doesn’t care what Gretchen wants. So Lizzie will give Gretchen Gus, Gus will give Gretchen the man of her dreams, and among this oddball cast of marvelous misfits, someone just may discover the secret to true romance.

The Boyfriend School (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Teen & Young Adult

At thirty-eight, Trudy Herring is a dreamer, a sculptor of whimsical clay figures, and a permanent temporary worker at the San Antonio Museum of Folk Art. But all that changes when she agrees to incubate a child for Hillary Goettler (her boss) and Hillary’s husband. Trudy moves into their mansion and is instantly thrust into a luxurious world she’s never known before. While Hillary opines that parenthood is simply a “time-management problem,” Trudy is forced to consume noxiously healthy meals in a home where the decor changes faster than a Neiman Marcus window display. As her body warms to the other life inside, Trudy begins to long for her old flame, Sinclair Coker, “a freelance mystic with a lot of enthusiasm for the carnal.” The quest to satisfy her cravings leads Trudy to discover that it takes a lot more than war stories about childbirth and potty training for a woman to qualify for true membership in “the mommy club.”

The Mommy Club (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

“Bird captures the staccato passion of flamenco in a rapturous love triangle.” –People “The Flamenco Academy opens so boldly . . . that you have to wonder how [Sarah] Bird can sustain such high drama. But it quickly becomes apparent that she’s mapped her novel’s treacherous terrain and planned accordingly, building characters sturdy enough to stand firmly, even when their emotions are spinning out of control.” –The New York Times Book Review The first commandment of flamenco is Dame la verdad–Give me the truth. But for Cyndi Rae Hrncir, a shy seventeen-year-old, the truth is too painful to share. When Rae becomes infatuated with the devastatingly handsome flamenco guitarist Tomás Montenegro, she and her best friend, Didi, immerse themselves in the exotic world of the Gypsy dance and in the spellbinding stories told by their legendary teacher, Doña Carlota, Tomás’s great-aunt. Locked in a volatile triangle and driven by obsession–Didi with fame, Rae with Tomás, and Tomás with the mystery of his origin–the three sharpen their performances, while danger, longing, and betrayal pulse beneath each step. When a heartbreaking longheld secret comes to light, Rae is duty-bound to honor the laws of flamenco and finally reveal the truth. “The stuff bestsellers are made of . . . [The Flamenco Academy is] funny and beautifully structured to create anticipation and suspense, with lush moments of romance and a surprisingly sturdy backbone.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Good conflict makes good fiction, and that’s what gives The Flamenco Academy such irresistible energy and narrative drive. . . . A heady brew of a novel, lushly romantic at one turn, wryly and wittily observant at the next.” –Houston Chronicle “A deft exploration of love, desire and jealousy told against the backdrop of that most complex of dances, flamenco.” –Baltimore Sun

The Flamenco Academy: A Novel

Sarah Bird’s gutsy, sharp, and touching new novel opens at full speed. Bernadette "Bernie" Root, military brat, speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her eight-member Air Force family is (with the exception of her Post Princess sister, Kit), until the summer after her first year of college when she joins them at their new assignment: Kadena Air Base, Okinawa. Just as Okinawa turns out to be a sorry version of the Japanese paradise Bernie knew in her childhood at Yokota Air Base, her family, especially her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy-pilot father, Mace, seems to have been in decline since those glory days of the American Raj. Days when her mother was happy and their best friend, Fumiko, now lost to them, was the family’s maid. The worst part of Okinawa for Bernie, though, is realizing how perfectly she fits with her oddball family and how badly she needs to get out. So when a dance contest first prize, a trip to Japan,offers a chance to escape, she takes it, playing second banana to a third-rate comedian on a tour of Japan’s military bases. At their grand finale at the Yokota Officers’ Club, Fumiko finally reappears, and Bernie discovers the terrible price that is paid when the secrets nations hide end up buried within families. A brilliantly appealing novel whose energy, wit, and feeling have won for it (see back of the jacket) extraordinary advance praise.

The Yokota Officers Club

Assigned to cover a convention of romance writers and bored with the prospect, Gretchen Griner is surprised to find the authors intelligent and offbeat, and is even more surprised when two of the writers attempt to fix her up with the perfect boyfriend

Boyfriend School

DOUBLEDAY

A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year In her most ambitious, moving, and provocative novel to date, Sarah Bird makes a stunning departure. Above the East China Sea tells the entwined stories of two teenaged girls, an American and an Okinawan, whose lives are connected across seventy years by the shared experience of profound loss, the enduring strength of an ancient culture, and the redeeming power of family love. Luz James, a contemporary U.S. Air Force brat, lives with her strictly-by-the-rules sergeant mother at Kadena Air Base in Okianawa. Luz’s older sister, her best friend and emotional center, has just been killed in the Afghan war. Unmoored by her sister’s death and a lifetime of constant moving from base to base, Luz turns for the comfort her service-hardened mother cannot offer to the “Smokinawans,” the “waste cases,” who gather to get high every night in a deserted cove. When even pills, one-hitters, Cuervo Gold, and a growing crush on Jake Furusato aren’t enough to soften the unbearable edge, the desolate girl contemplates taking her own life. In 1945, Tamiko Kokuba, along with two hundred of her classmates, is plucked out of her elite girls’ high school and trained to work in the Imperial Army’s horrific cave hospitals. With defeat certain, Tamiko finds herself squeezed between the occupying Japanese and the invading Americans. She believes she has lost her entire family, as well as the island paradise she so loved, and, like Luz, she aches with a desire to be reunited with her beloved sister. On an island where the spirits of the dead are part of life and your entire clan waits for you in the afterworld, suicide offers Tamiko the promise of peace. As Luz tracks down the story of her own Okinawan grandmother, she discovers that, if she surrenders to the most unbrat impulse and allows herself to connect completely with a place and its people, the ancestral spirits will save not only Tamiko but her as well. Propelled by a riveting narrative and set at the very epicenter of the headline-grabbing clash now emerging between the great powers, Above the East China Sea is at once a remarkable chronicle of how war shapes the lives of conquerors as well as the conquered and a deeply moving account of family, friendship, and love that transcends time.

Above the East China Sea: A novel

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Books by Bird, Sarah