Ruth Wire

The Night Birds Still Sing Ruth Wire

The evening after Pearl Harbor is attacked, Phoebe's best friend and family are hauled away by the police to an internment camp. Her mother can no longer stand her traditional husband's lack of affection. She leaves the marriage, and, to carry herself and her daughters through the war, opens a rooming house.

Now the shades may be drawn and the streetlights covered at night to hide coastal homes from Japanese bombs, and Phoebe might long for her absent father and unconsciously seek him in the various men who populate the rooming house, but through all the ensuing years of Phoebe's life, the night birds still sing.

It is Hollywood. The roomers are celebrities, jazz musicians, con-artists, long-suffering writers and Holocaust survivors; their adventures are fictionalized by Phoebe, a lover of words and aspiring author, in her journal.

The Night Birds Still Sing is funny, melancholic, full of longing, anger, and despair, and driven by the hopes of youth.