"The Flightless Birds of New Hope"

Farah Naz Rishi is a Pakistani-American Muslim writer and voice actor, but in another life, she’s worked stints as a lawyer, a video game journalist, and an editorial assistant. She received her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College, her J.D. from Lewis & Clark Law School, and her love of weaving stories from the Odyssey Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing, she’s probably hanging out with video game characters. Rishi lives in Philadelphia.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Flightless Birds of New Hope, with the following results:

Page 69 of The Flightless Birds of New Hope looks backward. Aden is ten. His sister, Aliza, is five. Their parents have left them home alone for the evening to attend a dinner party—something they still occasionally did back then, before their lives narrowed around bird shows and ribbons and the long, obsessive weekends that followed. Before Coco became the center of their world. Before everything began to orbit her.

Aden makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for himself and his sister and puts on Finding Nemo, Aliza’s favorite movie at the time. He lets her curl up on the couch beside him, eyelids fluttering, the crust of her sandwich still clutched in one hand. Within minutes, she’s asleep. The house seems to register it too: walls settling, silence blooming in the corners. Aden allows himself, briefly, to breathe with it. His shoulders loosen. A rare indulgence. Then he goes to check on Coco, the family’s cockatoo, sitting in her cage in the corner of the living room, “like a piece of furniture someone had forgotten to move.”

I think a browser opening the book to page 69 would get a true—if partial—sense of the whole. Not the plot, exactly—this is not a novel propelled by spectacle—but the emotional logic of the book. This page contains many of the forces that shape the story: a child stepping into a caretaker role, a family consumed by both obsession and neglect, and a quiet, almost imperceptible shift in what home truly feels like. The book unfolds in moments like this, where nothing is announced and everything is already changing.

What page 69 reveals is how The Flightless Birds of New Hope understands love and loss: not as singular events, but as slow accumulations. Aden isn’t frightened or resentful here. He’s capable. Attentive. Even calm. But that calm carries weight. It’s the kind that settles into a body early and never quite leaves. The Flightless Birds of New Hope is built from these small domestic scenes—children depending on each other, their house holding its breath, love expressed through action rather than words. If a browser were to read only this page, they might not know where the story goes, but they would know how it moves: slowly, inwardly, and with an understanding that the ordinary moments are the ones that end up mattering most.

Visit Farah Naz Rishi's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Flightless Birds of New Hope.

--Marshal Zeringue