Jake is twelve years old. He has become invisible.
While his fourteen-year-old sister Olivia spirals into crisis, Jake watches from the edges of his own family - the boy nobody notices, the sibling nobody asks about, the child quietly falling through the gaps while everyone focuses on his sister.
The doctors call it anorexia. But to Olivia, the problem has never been food. Her world is too loud, too bright, too full of a static frequency that nobody else can hear. While their mother fights a medical system that refuses to listen and their father retreats into quiet despair, Jake is the only one who truly sees her.
When the clinical pathways fail and the hospital wards leave Olivia more diminished than before, an unexpected connection with a traveller boy named Riley and his horses offers something the system never could: the simple, radical act of being understood.
Little Bird is a story about what happens inside a family when one child becomes a diagnosis. About the siblings who disappear in plain sight. About a medical world that prioritises labels over the people wearing them. And about the fierce, quiet love in a family that survives everything a broken system throws at them.
With a chapter-by-chapter playlist woven into its structure, Little Bird is as much felt as it is read.
Themes include: neurodivergence and misdiagnosis, the invisible sibling, eating disorders and the medical model, sensory overload, sibling bonds, systemic failure in CAMHS and NHS mental health services.
Perfect for readers of: Claire Keegan, Maggie O'Farrell, and anyone who has ever felt unseen by a system designed to help them - or loved someone who has.
Published by Bright Raven Press. Written by Claire Buttrum, somatic therapist and neurodivergent author.
