From the Stone Soup Blog
The Pipe Tree
When Éclair the sparrow is forcefully shoved into a life in a cage, it is like a storm has come and swept away everything he has ever known. After years of living free in the wild, Éclair is now entrapped inside a constricting and inescapable prison. But when his captor, a woman coined as “the handkerchief woman,” starts bribing Éclair with muffins and bombarding him with stories from her daily life, he starts to grudgingly make a hesitant friendship with her.
Such begins The Pipe Tree, the moving debut novel by Lily Jessen. It portrays the protagonist coming to terms with an uncertain future and friendship, with the easy choice between freedom and life behind bars suddenly becoming almost impossible as the relationship between the two becomes more and more complex.
In short chapters set at Éclair’s present-day Portland, Maine, he narrates the story of how the friendship between him and the handkerchief woman came to be, and what further steps he should take to gain trust—and potentially a route to freedom. Some of the novel, however, addresses the question of freedom itself, and testing whether their friendship is strong enough to hold themselves together.
As a wild, pastry-loving sparrow, Éclair easily falls to the temptation of a sweet treat, especially éclairs and blueberry muffins. When he arrives at the apartment, he easily feels out of place, trapped in a mysterious world. Looking for potential ways to escape, he starts closely observing the woman’s routine, and the house around him. When, on the first few days after capture, he immediately notices the lack of extravagance in the apartment, especially when it comes to the dinners, in which the woman eats cereal.
But Éclair is particularly moved by the way the woman seemed to be missing something, just like he himself, something expressed in the way she talks and sings. Éclair sees the sadness in her actions.
You can read the rest of Jeremy’s piece at: https://stonesoup.com/post/the-pipe-tree-reviewed-by-jeremy-lim-11/.
About the Stone Soup Blog
We publish original work—writing, art, book reviews, multimedia projects, and more—by young people on the Stone Soup Blog. You can read more posts by young bloggers, and find out more about submitting a blog post, here: https://stonesoup.com/stone-soup-blog/.
