Messenger Bird

by Dan McCall

Book Overview

From the author of Jack the Bear comes this tale of a young surgeon, Jim, assigned to a small hospital on an Apache reservation. Among a stoic people burdened by a cruel history, poverty, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151592845
• ISBN13: 9780151592845
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

"true-to-life" fiction

While reading Dan McCall's short novel Messenger Bird, I had to keep returning to the book jacket to remind myself that this was a novel, rather than a particularly engaging and sensitive memoir. Told in the first person, McCall's book recounts two years in the life of a young surgeon, Jim, paying off his medical school loans by working at a small hospital in New Mexico on an Apache reservation. The "messenger bird" of the title is Annie Messenger Bird Lester Mendez, a gifted nurse at the hospital who becomes Jim's lover and best insight into the Indian community. Much of this novel is episodic -- medical emergencies confronted by Jim, or his life in the community. Through these vignettes McCall constructs a community, two characters (Jim and Annie) and a larger social structure that resonate with compassion and truth. I read this short book in two sittings, and wished it were half again as long. Highly recommended.