Coo – Kaela Noel

44148575.jpg
Ten years ago, an impossible thing happened: a flock of pigeons picked up a human baby who had been abandoned in an empty lot and carried her, bundled in blankets, to their roof. Coo has lived her entire life on the rooftop with the pigeons who saved her. It’s the only home she’s ever known. But then a hawk nearly kills Burr, the pigeon she loves most, and leaves him gravely hurt. Coo must make a perilous trip to the ground for the first time to find Tully, a retired postal worker who occasionally feeds Coo’s flock and can heal injured birds. Tully mends Burr’s broken wing and coaxes Coo from her isolated life. Living with Tully, Coo experiences warmth, safety, and human relationships for the first time. But just as Coo is beginning to blossom, she learns that the human world is infinitely more complex—and cruel—than she could have imagined.
3 Facts aboutt Coo and Kaela:
1: COO is about a girl raised by a flock of pigeons. There’s a rich history of feral children in literature and myth going back to Romulus and Remus, the twin boys who were supposedly raised by a wolf before founding Rome, and Semiramis, an ancient Assyrian queen alleged to have been fed by doves after being abandoned as an infant. The real life stories of supposed feral children are much sadder, of course, with many cases of abuse, and others of children exploited in hoaxes. Coo’s life with the pigeons is on the whole happy, but she struggles with loneliness, cold, and hunger until Tully, a retired postal worker who cares for hurt pigeons, steps in to adopt her.
2: I moved all the time as a child with my single mom. Luckily I didn’t change schools very frequently, but due to the precariousness of being renters, we bounced from apartment to apartment every year or two until I was in my teens. I spent most of those years in several different towns and cities in New Jersey, including Jersey City.
3. I got the very first inkling of an idea for Coo one afternoon when I was a teenager and watched a flock of pigeons take off in flight from an abandoned factory building in Jersey City, right near the Hudson River waterfront. What if someone lived with them? A child? I went home that afternoon and wrote down the first chapter of what eventually became COO. It took many starts and stops over the years before I had a finished manuscript, and then still more revisions before I found my wonderful, patient agent Katie Grimm and a home for COO with the fantastic, kind, and perceptive editor Virginia Duncan at Greenwillow.
If you love the sound of this book as much as me then here are the Links to add it to Goodreads and PRE ORDER:
2020 books Kaela would  recommend:
HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE SEA by Tanya Guerrero
FOREVER GLIMMER CREEK by Stacy Hackney

Leave a comment