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    Hummingbirds: A Novel
    Hummingbirds: A Novel
    Hummingbirds: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Hummingbirds: A Novel

    Written by Joshua Gaylord

    Narrated by Cynthia Holloway

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    A wonderfully compelling novel about the intertwining-and darkly surprising-relationships between the teachers and students at an all-girl prep school, Hummingbirds marks the debut of author Joshua Gaylord, a prep school teacher himself on New York City's Upper East Side. Spanning a year at the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, this intimate private school community becomes tempestuous and dangerously incestuous as the rivalries and secrets of teachers and students interact, intersect, and eventually collide. Ultimately, Hummingbirds poses a fascinating question: who are the adults and who are the children?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 21, 2009
    ISBN9781400184651

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    Reviews for Hummingbirds

    3/5

    24 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      Joshua Gaylord is a fantastic writer. There are paragraphs in Hummingbirds that I reread 2 and even 3 times because they were just so well written as to warrant it. For the use of the word "palimpsest", which is one of my favorites and criminally underutilized, 10 points are awarded in my book. However, just as man does not live on bread alone, the author does not work with words alone, he must also be a storyteller. This, in my opinion is where Gaylord is less strong.I have to admit that through much of Hummingbirds I found myself longing for it to be over. Gaylord seemed unable, even with all his fantastic words, to develop emotions fully. I thought that this might be because so many of his characters are conflicted, trapped in developmental and relational limbo, but even when the scene evolves to true climax, such as Binhammer throwing out Sybil, the emotions seem muted. Even when the characters are angry or hurting, it is through some narrative scrim.I feel like I have to get my dislike for the manner in which Mrs. Mayhew is dispatched off my chest as well. I know it is not particularly central to the plot, but I reached that particular point in the story and had to go back and check what had just happened. One paragraph she is reading desk graffiti and the next she is gone, with seemingly no lead up.The book did wrap up into a somewhat appeasing story. Ted Hughes is dealt with in a way befitting of the ridiculous and large character he is by that point. Dixie and Liz learn they are not really so different. Liz, who was disappointingly unrelatable to me considering I was an overly self-aware, judgmental, withdrawn teenage girl, gets her fulfillment and her disappointment. And Binhammer seems just as far from reaching real, solid happiness as he always was, but also just as far from misery. The problem, to me, was that while the ending is acceptable I doubt I would have gotten there had this not been part of a personal reading challenge. I would have succumbed to the screaming desire to return Carmine-Casey high school to the library shelf whence it came.
    • 3/5
      Different characters face similar situations, but they handle them differently. The writing is full of metaphors and poetic language, so if that appeals to you you'll love this book. A few things do happen in the story, but the focus is more on the characters' motivations and emotions, not on events or even reactions to the events. The writing style at times is cinematic in the sense that at the end of a scene the author may allow a background character to come to the front, so the focus shifts from one person to another to yet another.
    • 3/5
      Set at an elite Manhattan all girls high school, HUMMINGBIRDS is a novel of simmering high-school angst, from the perspective of the teachers as well as the students, and is not the dishy, Gossip Girl-esque novel of conspicuous consumption and extravagant vice one might expect.

      The protagonist, young and handsome Leo Binhammer, is the only male teacher in the English department of the Carmine-Casey School, and he likes it that way. He loves it when students preen and fight for his attention, and he loves it when the female teachers in his department do it, too. Binhammer is naturally threatened when Ted Hughes is hired to teach English at the beginning of the new year, and his negative feelings solidify when he recognizes Hughes as the man who had a brief affair with his wife two years earlier.

      When Hughes arrives, he quickly starts moving in on Binhammer’s turf – charming the other teachers in the English department and captivating the students. He seems to do everything that Binhammer does, only a little better – grading papers faster, and marking each one with more thoughtful comments; getting up in front of a classroom and teaching even more intellectual material, with even more brio. Hughes is a doppelganger – a flashier, slicker, but also nastier version of Binhammer. Binhammer wants to hate Hughes, but he can’t – they are too alike.

      HUMMINGBIRDS is so titled because Binhammer thinks the students at his school remind him of hummingbirds, “their delicate, over-heated bodies fretting in short, angled bursts of movement around a bottle of red sugar water.” The novel focuses on two students at the high school: the charismatic, popular Dixie Doyle and the dour intellectual Liz Warren. They are well drawn, complex characters. Dixie has a crush on Binhammer, while Liz has a crush on Hughes – and each girl gives the teacher she likes an opportunity to make their girlish fantasies come true. Binhammer tells Dixie that, if things were different, he’d be interested – he crosses a line, but he is motivated by kindness and pity. Hughes, on the other hand, is selfish – he brings Liz back to his apartment one night and takes her virginity.

      In the end, Hughes is caught and fired. But nobody ever finds out about Binhammer’s admission to Dixie, so he regains his position as the only male English teacher at Carmine-Casey.

      HUMMINGBIRDS is full of frequent rhapsodies about the glorious mystery of young girls, with a LOLITA-esqe atmosphere of restrained sexuality throughout. It is a portrait of a man who has learned to look but not touch, observing an evil, darker version of himself that cannot resist temptation. The novel is elegant and insightful, but also dreadfully slow. Not much happens, and Binhammer is ultimately a little too good to be true (it’s certainly no coincidence that the author himself was once a teacher at a Manhattan high school)
    • 2/5
      AUDIO VERSION.This book was a really strange read - or since it was the audio book - a really strange listen? It was very uneven and kept meandering in the slowest way - taking time to deviate to all kinds of asides - rather than feeling meaty and complex - it felt really unfocused and messy. The main character Binhammer was really hard to understand. He seemed to react to experiences in a really uneven and unpredictable way. The other major character Ted Hughes was lack luster. His portrayal in the book really didn't support the adoration that he reportedly received from all the women of the world. Really strange book - felt like a first draft that really needed some major help with direction and editing. *******The book was not helped by the reader either. She was not well practiced at male voices and employed a technique for the male characters of sort of just letting her voice peter out in to a staccato growl-y noise at the end of each thought that was really annoying. In retrospect - I find it really odd that they went with a female reader when the book is so heavily male.
    • 3/5
      If you like witty and satirical writing about prep school peccadilloes, this was enjoyable light reading, but I would strongly suggest "The Headmaster's Dilemma," by Louis Auchincloss, as a better example of this genre.
    • 4/5
      Leo Binhammer is an English instructor at Carmine-Casey Academy, a private high school for girls. Adored and admired, Leo finds great contentment and solace in his profession as the only male teacher in the English department, doting girls following his every move. But Leo's world is disrupted when, one day, a charismatic new teacher named Ted Hughes arrives. This teacher is also a young and attractive man, and although he is friendly and amiable, Leo begins to feel displaced from his high perch at the school when the girls begin to notice and appreciate the attractive newcomer. As Leo learns to adjust to his new circumstances, life continues on at school and complexities and rivalries crop up in not only the students' lives, but in the teachers' as well. Leo and Ted become unlikely friends and Leo begins to unwittingly uncover all the many secrets and intrigues that Ted has kept hidden. Wryly amusing and stylistically deft, Hummingbirds is a cautionary and provocative tale about the overly fragile egos of two very educated men.I really enjoyed this book, and for the most part, I would have to say that it was extremely well crafted. I was impressed with the author's writing style. It was very fluid and engaging, and in addition, most of the writing was very witty and humorous. The author seemed really adept at creating humorous situations and dialogue that really made the story sparkle and sizzle. Other sections of the book were written a bit like prose: great imagery and succinct word choices that made an impact without being overbearing. The writing struck the perfect balance for me by being neither too sparse nor too wordy, and instead I felt that the author was able to capture the emotions and conundrums of his characters perfectly. The narrative was told through several points of view, but these shifts were handled very solidly and without a lot of confusion, making the multiple narrator strategy very successful.The story actually had three subplots: two involving the teachers, and one involving the students. It was very amusing to see that the teachers and staff had more drama and intrigue going on than the students did and that they handled their dramas with much more immaturity and snark than a group of teenage girls ever could. Though the story that focused on the students was interesting and involving, I thought that the grist behind the teachers' escapades was much more satisfying to me personally. I think on the whole, the story was integrated very well, with neither side dominating the limelight excessively.I also thought that all of the characterizations were done very well and were remarkably detailed, though my favorite was the exasperated Binhammer, who sometimes could be a bit churlish when it came to his waning popularity. The author really had the knack for crating well rounded three dimensional characters, and I thought that he was quite brilliant in his creations of the schoolgirls. He managed to capture all the innocence and seductiveness that was teetering on the edge of their femininity remarkably well, and it was not hard at all to take them seriously as both girls and women due to their expert creation.The only part of the book that I took exception to was the ending. Up until the last section of the book, I was happily reading along and spending most of my mental energy in being impressed by the author's turn of phrase or expert scene creation. I was completely taken by surprise by the turn the book took towards the end, and the main thing that bothered me was not the direction that the action took in the story, but the way the characters reacted to it. I don't want to say too much about the plot twist because I fear I will be giving too much away to those that are going to read the book, but after a certain point, I didn't think that the reactions of the surrounding characters were very realistic, especially in the case of Binhammer. It was almost as if he changed some of the fundamental aspects of his character. After examining it more closely, I also draw the conclusion that perhaps the reader doesn't know the true Binhammer until the ending of the book, and that these revelations about his character had always been there just waiting to be exposed under the right circumstances. Whatever the case may be, I felt that the ending left me a little bewildered, if not taken aback. I don't think that my bewilderment at the conclusion of the book drastically affected my enjoyment of it, and to a certain degree, I think it may have changed or even enriched the complexity of the story, so I can't really say that the ending was a disappointment. Rather I will say that I think it was a little unexpected and made me reshape the terms under which I was reading.There were a lot of wonderful aspects to this story and I think that if you are the type of person to appreciate witty and satirical writing, this is definitely the book for you. The plot and character creation were first rate, as was the smooth writing. This is not only a great book to lose yourself in, it is a book that will make you think and evaluate the power of interpersonal relationships. A great read.