The Mincing Mockingbird Guide to Troubled Birds by Matt Adrian (March 08

Cute presentation, but language is foul (not fowl). Of course, I'm an old prude. This is NOT a book that can be read in front of grandma, the preacher, the kids... Not worth the money for the author to show off his potty-mouth. I don't often trash a book, but this one's leaving my library before it gets in. Also not going to be part of anyone else's library.

Remember Jack Handey and his "Deep Thoughts" from the old Saturday Night Live? Slightly off-kilter, vaguely inane and sort of gormless, but somehow deeply insightful, musings? Well, take that same sort of one-liner humor, but make it psychotically angry and twisted and use it to caption pretty, but intense, bird paintings. That's more or less what you get here.

Usually you don't have pretty, colorful, cute birds telling you "I'll Even Kill Your Soul". The occasional brief, unnerving comments and observations and stories that lead you from picture to picture just add to the wild wrongness of the whole setup and make this a deeply satisfying and essential guide. You ignore it at your peril.

Remember Jack Handey and his "Deep Thoughts" from the old Saturday Night Live? Slightly off-kilter, vaguely inane and sort of gormless, but somehow deeply insightful, musings? Well, take that same sort of one-liner humor, but make it psychotically angry and twisted and use it to caption pretty, but intense, bird paintings. That's more or less what you get here.

Usually you don't have pretty, colorful, cute birds telling you "I'll Even Kill Your Soul". The occasional brief, unnerving comments and observations and stories that lead you from picture to picture just add to the wild wrongness of the whole setup and make this a deeply satisfying and essential guide. You ignore it at your peril.

This is a truly unpleasant book. I expected dark humor and a few lines in it were wicked funny, but most of it is just creepy. We don't want it in our house, so rather than donating it to the library or thrift shop, I'm sending it back to the store.

Waste of money, we returned the book.
Clever though, the minimal text is cute, BUT the art is amateurish and not too good. So what you have is that the books are being marketed based on "bird speak," - cutsey little sayings with a small picture of a bird who is supposed to have uttered the accompanying words.
In reality the art is trivial, and quickly done, not very well painted or executed. Without the captions what you have is a small book with some hasty, partially drawn bird pictures - disjoined the parts do not stand on their own.
If you like bird paintings, there are far superior artist renderings....if you like cutsey dribble get children's book for more originality

What a beautiful little treasure, a great gift for the bird lover with a somewhat dark sense of humor. You CAN judge this book by its cover, however, the fake battered cover really looks like an old out of print book! Like something you'd find after hours and hours of digging through stacks and stacks of junk in someone's old abandoned barn,and as powerful and poetic as unrequited love, this will touch you somewhere deep down in the center of your soul, assuming of course, that you still have one.

I'm cackling just THINKING about those birds. The illustrations are lovely and the words are twisted.

I just handed the copy to a friend and she's sitting there, reading and laughing without pause.

I was immediately drawn to this book by the interesting cover. Once I read the first sentence, I had to have it. Totally unexpected in it's dark, dark humor it delves into the minds of some truly troubled birds. If this kind of humor is your thing you will love this book!

Just bought the only copy (their last or first, not sure) at Reading Frenzy in Portland. THANK YOU for writing this, author person. Great design and comedy, which compliment each other nicely, and in turn, me. Looking forward to whatever you do next.

Just quite the angry book. Taking human like extremes and applying it to birds. I was hoping for more interesting dialogue rather than just angry ranting. Every post seems pretty much the same. Upsetting.

Unfunny & judgmental. Feels the need to frame the birds as "observe these hardened criminals..." and throws around derogatory words for sex workers. Very little of it is actually in the same style as the stuff you see around on the internet. Basically, the good stuff is already out there and the rest is a gross disappointment.

This book contains a joke that is very damaging to the special needs community. It's in the series of pictures of birds with captions meant to express their identities as if they were certain astrological signs. The third one compares its dancing to having a seizure.

Have you ever seen someone had a seizure? Have you had one yourself? I have done both. Before that, I spent 20 years as a dancer.

Never in my life would I compare anything having to do with dancing with what it is like to either experience or see someone else have a seizure. All seizures have the potential to be life-threatening. To shut down autonomic systems like breathing and your heart beating. To cause brain damage. To end a life.

This is not funny. This is reducing a neurological condition to a joke. It's wrong. And the people who wrote it and those laughing at it should be deeply ashamed of themselves.