'How do birds see the world? Do they have a totally different way of experiencing life than humans do? Are they stoic? Is their threshold of pain and loneliness completely different from ours?

Can a bird die of a broken heart?

'In case you haven't figured it out, what I'm trying to say is that when I was six years old and had a guinea pig, I didn't ask any of these kinds of questions. The guinea pig was just a damn guinea pig and I petted it and fed it and cleaned its cage, but I sure as hell didn't worry about a zillion ramifications of its mental condition. I'm trying to say that with age - in my case from six to sixteen - the world has become a whole lot more complicated.'

After witnessing the death of her mother at the age of eight, life is never going to be simple for Laura Winger... but, from Disneyland to Venice, her dad succeeds in making it a whole lot easier.

If reading Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye moved you because of the narrator's unease with childhood transitioning to adolescence, Ferguson's narrator in Don't Bullshit Me Daddy - 16-year-old Laura Winger - will move you to embrace the inescapable rite of passage into old age and certain mortality. Yes, there are still some 'phonies' out there, but this novel - rather than being about the loss of innocence - affirms that innocence exists in everyone.