Love and Ordinary Creatures
“The beautifully written book
Love & Ordinary Creatures speaks of family and love…It tells of the powerful and often surprising human-animal connections, transcending species, and explores the way we connect with our environment, its creatures, and one another…a gripping tale of the human condition and the deeper meanings of love, life and sacrifice.”
—
Kim Michele Richardson of Huffington Post Books
Love and Ordinary Creatures is told through the eyes of a cockatoo in love with his very human caretaker. Snatched in a net from his Australian homeland as a young parrot, Caruso has adapted to captivity and has learned the lessons of love from his previous owner, Theodore Pinter, who was obsessively fixated on his childhood sweetheart. Now in his new home with the beautiful and talented Clarissa, Caruso has found both love and happiness—until a handsome stranger arrives in town and sets his sights on Clarissa. Smart, passionate, and wildly inventive, Caruso strives to put his human rival in his place before he steals Clarissa away for good.
Set in the early 1990s in the quaint seashore town of Ocracoke, North Carolina, Love and Ordinary Creatures is an exquisite tale of love and hope transcending species.
To download a free PDF sample, click here.
“Here is an exquisitely-written, completely original, and deeply moving meditation on true love. A literary page-turner,
Love and Ordinary Creatures is Rubio's best book, populated by a memorable cast of characters we come to count as friends and a vivid sense of place that allows us to escape into a lush sensory world. I couldn't put it down and when I did turn the last page I shed the best kind of tears, ones that come when we have encountered a book that manages to articulate the most mysterious and wonderful chambers of the heart.”
—
Silas House, author of
Clay's Quilt and
Eli the Good
“There is nothing ordinary about Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s expertly crafted and articulated Love and Ordinary Creatures. It has been suggested that the more we know the richer our lives become, and here Rubio provides a whole new perspective on love and loving, as well as jealousy, ownership, and control. This stunningly imaginative work explores the psychological and emotional boundaries of the human condition with grace and power. Rubio writes with the passion and attention to detail we have come to expect of her, and her fully drawn characters are with us long after we reluctantly bid them goodbye. In the end we know these people, we know their sense of place, and we care about their lives and their prospects. At the center of any good book is a good story, and this story is nothing short of splendid.”
—Linda Scott DeRosier, Ph.D., author of Creeker: A Woman's Journey and Songs of Life and Grace
