An escaped housecat encounters twelve birds in the back yard but fails to catch any of them and has to eat feathers for lunch.

A mother bird frantically tries to keep her seven baby birds fed. But seven hungry hatchlings are a lot. Can one little mama manage them all?

"In a tiny village in rural Iran, Zal's demented mother--horrified by his pale skin and hair, the opposite of her own--becomes convinced her baby is evil. She puts him in a wire birdcage on her veranda with the rest of her caged flock, and there he stays for the next ten years: eating birdseed and insects, defecating on the newspaper he squats upon, squawking and shrieking like the other birds.He is rescued from that hell and adopted by a behavioral...

"Coo, a ten-year-old girl raised by a flock of pigeons, delights in finally making human contact, but quickly learns that our world is more cruel and complicated than she could have guessed"--