CORDELIA'S SONG - David Stanley
Paperback $31.99 Postage $6.00Learn more about the author in the video below and on his profile page.
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Written in the style of Watership Down by Richard Adams, this book tells the poignant story of a group of magpies who are fighting for survival and the young bird who becomes their saviour.
Born with two larger, stronger brothers, Cordelia learns very early how to stand up for herself. Her parents are proud of her courage and tenacity, but they have no idea how valuable those characteristics will be when their peaceful valley home is threatened. Her father, Corzell has a premonition that something evil is coming to the valley. But the five valley clans are still caught off-guard when the Krat clan, led by Captain Kratt invade the valley and start to banish other magpie clans to take over the clan lands. During the fight to repel the invaders, many lives are lost. After receiving a head injury and falling into the back of a ute, Cordelia is whisked away to a property hundreds of kilometres from the valley. With no memory of her former life, she must re-discover who she is and where she is from, before finding her way back to the valley to seek revenge on Kratt. When she returns, what greets her is not one problem but two. In the final fight, assistance comes from an unlikely source. |
REVIEWS
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‘Let the word go out into all the lands, I have not only read a huge novel entirely about rabbits but found it fascinating.’
From a review by Bernard Levin in THE TIMES about WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams, back in 1972. A reviewer could write similarly about Cordelia’s Story, a novel about several ‘clans’ of magpies living in a secluded valley in the heart of the Australian bush. Back in 1972, Richard Adams had great difficulty in finding a home for WATERSHIP DOWN, a book which David freely admits was part of the inspiration for this story, largely because it didn’t fit easily into any existing category of novel. The same might be said about CORDELIA’s SONG. It will certainly appeal greatly to lovers of the fauna and flora of the Australian bush as it contains much fascinating material about the lives and behavior of especially its birdlife, but it is also a fine grand fantasy in its own right with an unlikely but brave little heroine, in the tradition of WATERSHIP DOWN. Perhaps the film rights will be speedily snapped up and the book made into an exciting, animated feature film? It’s that type of exciting, fast-moving story which would hugely benefit from the addition of visuals to David’s detailed descriptions of the bush and its inhabitants. I’m told that a sequel is already in the works. Stephen Stanley Every day, right around Australia we meet some of the creatures in David Stanley’s new novel, Cordelia’s Song.
We hear their warbling at daybreak and at sunset. But do we ever realise that an unseen world of love, violence and family loyalty fills the lives of these wonderful birds? David has created a suspense filled novel that will have you barracking for the heroes in this ornithological war and peace. Tim Putman Review of Cordelia’s Song by George Clark 29th April 2024
If you like hand-to-hand combat or beak and claw battles between rival magpie clans and a view of the world from the skies, then you will love this book by David Stanley. The author has successfully imagined a world where humans are secondary to the magpie world of beaks and nests and the Kratt clan “law by claw”. Here we have a lifelike story where birds and animals communicate in their own language, responding to dawn and dusk and the vegetation of the country they live in. The magpie (mytre) protagonists have all the strengths and weaknesses of humans (norzela). There are battles and bushfires faced with courage and ingenuity. The characters are real, and you won’t look at a magpie again without thinking of Cordelia. Stanley clearly loves his magpie characters and gives them warm personalities and good and bad manners like gangs of boys and girls and there are plenty of moral perspectives in Cordelia’s Song. |
Cordelia’s Song might simply described as Watership Down with wings – and in the dramatic setting of the Australian outback.
I’m the author’s brother, so you would expect me to write a positive review, but believe me, I’ve not always been as positive about David’s writing, and actually advised him not to publish a book he wrote nearly twenty years ago. In the meantime, he’s certainly come on as a fiction author, and Cordelia’s Song is an inspired idea well executed. The challenge of writing a convincing animal story is to create characters that manifest personalities and feelings without compromising their animal-ness. In Cordelia’s Song, David has done just that: Cordelia herself is a life-like heroine, whose motivations and actions are believable, as is her special power, of prescience, though integrated cleverly into the plot. His central characters – ‘mytres’ (what we know as ‘Magpies’) – face a kind of avian Game of Thrones, resisting a take-over by a rogue bird and its followers. David deftly paints the mytre ‘clan’ and its allies and enemies, plausibly endowing the birds with voices, relationships, beliefs, legends, mythology and even a religion. Through the drama of the aggressors’ take-over, of Cordelia’s resistance, flight and ultimate victory, she remains a convincing character, but always recognisably a bird. Besides mytres, the bird characters – eagles, owls, galahs, wagtails and currawongs – are also skillfully drawn and carefully distinguished, by appearance, personality and action. They all play parts in the drama of the valley and the station where Cordelia finds refuge. Cordelia’s Song is an animal novel in the great tradition dating from Black Beauty. It’s by no means a children’s novel, in that it deals with what might be described as ‘mature themes’, though it’s well judged and could be read by younger readers. Professor Peter Stanley |