More Miracle Than Bird

Georgie Hyde-Lees, twenty-one years old and more self-assured than she is knowledgeable, develops a relationship with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats in Alice Miller’s debut novel, More Miracle than Bird.

After leaving school to pursue a life of leisure, art, and her passion for translating poetry, Georgie finds herself unable to gallivant around WWI London due to the death of her father. Her mother, a socialite in her own right, wishes Georgie to live at home or return to school, but Georgie strikes out on her own and secures a position as a nurse at a wartime hospital. There she meets a handsome wounded soldier, Lieutenant Pike, who sees more in her than she sees in herself. Georgie struggles against her emerging feelings for him and the darker pull towards the Order, a nearly occult society that seeks to make sense of the world through séance, magic, and secret rituals. Yeats is a part of the Order, so her attraction to it and to him are mulled together.

Part romance novel, part historical fiction, the spell Miller casts with her first novel is mesmerizing, if a bit uneven. There are moments when one storyline seems sacrificed for the sake of another, but the overall effect of the world within More Miracle than Bird makes this book endlessly intriguing.