Kyoto, Japan, the hometown of sixteen-year-old Pinky Bell Asano, is speaking from the heart.
Things pent-up inside the townspeople are coming out—the repressed longings, the resentments, the dread—they’re bursting forth in staggering admissions across the staid community, thanks to the magic of a small souvenir, a stuffed cuckoo shrike, that Pinky Bell has brought home from her academic colloquium in the jungle of Borneo.
The little bird has somehow come alive, provoking mass confessions and saturating Kyoto with the mayhem of unbottled inhibitions.
Maybe all this “heartfulness” is not such a good idea after all, and Pinky Bell realizes it’s up to her to return the cuckoo to the rain forest—which has dispatched its own dark agents to sniff out the thief.
The young Pinky Bell must also keep her teen virtue intact from scheming rascals, while at the same time a tremendous supernatural clash looms between the cuckoo shrike and Kyoto’s own contending powers.
In a featherbrained world of cross-dressing professors and accidental space orbit solos, the characters inside an electronic game become self-aware, and the Borneo jungle—now minus its cuckoo shrike mentor—adopts a whole new curriculum, that of Nihilism 101.
Welcome to a new colloquium—one with heart.
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Cuckoo Heartfully
(Kindle)
Michael A. Greco 