Coo by Kaela Noel (review)

When Coo was a baby, she was abandoned in a railyard and carried to a rooftop by pigeons, and the human girl has lived in the dovecote on a New York roof with her flock ever since. Then one late fall day a particularly bold hawk, undeterred by Coo’s size and shouts, nearly snatches Burr, the pigeon Coo most relies on to look out for her. Coo must venture off the roof to bring an injured Burr to the “healer,” but she isn’t prepared for how small the sky is when one stands on the ground or just how foreign human language and behavior is. Living with the healer, a retired postal worker named Tully, Coo offers amusing insights into the things humans take for granted from freezers where food is stored in “icy piles of snow behind a plastic door” to beds, “a human’s nest.” As Tully grows increasingly attached to Coo and worries they will be separated if she reports the girl to the authorities, Coo begins to worry about her flock’s safety after she hears that some pigeons are being poisoned. Noel builds an immersive pigeon culture that includes prioritizing the flock over any individual bird and opinions about humans (“Not smart like birds, humans. Very sad, it is”). Coo’s final desperate move to help her flock offers a movie-worthy climax to this excellent raised-in-the-wild (well, the wilds of urban rooftops) story that will appeal to a wide range of readers.