How They Became Birds collects three short novels about growing up. In the title work, a man inherits a theme park from a woman who traumatized him there as a child, and who continues to haunt him as an adult. In 'Orogeny', a boy attempts to reconcile the inner and outer landscapes in his life, taking revenge on anyone standing in his way. The closing novella charts a teenager's destructive cross-continental flight from a brutal altercation with a town bully and the disarrayed life of the social worker assigned to save him. In all three stories memory, longing, and violence intersect to create unusual and honest portraits of youth in extremis.