"My name is Ava Sing Lo. I am a bird killer. The killer of my mother's birds."

So begins Gayle Brandeis' The Book of Dead Birds, a uniquely inventive novel about a young woman coming to terms with her mother's past, her own confused identity and a growing sense of responsibility toward an endangered environment.

The plot is no doubt only one of many reasons the book won the Bellwether Prize, an award established by Barbara Kingsolver to encourage works of socially engaged fiction.

Ava lives in an apartment in San Diego with her mother Helen, who was a prostitute in her native Korea. Ava's father was an unknown black American serviceman.

"When I'm around Korean people," Ava confesses, "especially my mother, I feel so black. When I'm around black people, I feel Korean. When I'm around anyone else, I just feel Other."

It would seem burden enough. But there's another. Ava quite unintentionally kills her mother's pet birds. Helen records their deaths in her notebook: "Ava, daughter, age 6, go to park, feed bread to goose, goose fall down and die. Piece bread too big?" A goose feather is taped to the page.

"Ava, daughter age 13, forget to close cage when clean, parakeet Lee Lee fly out window, find next morning on patio, smack himself dead on glass to get back in." Some glued birdseed and a blue feather serve as mementos.

Helen's own story is told here as well (which alternates with Ava's), about the brutal life she led following camps at U.S. Army posts in Korea. These vignettes are disturbingly graphic, somewhat gratuitously so at times, yet they serve as the central focus of Ava's dilemma, for she takes the shame and guilt of Helen's degenerate life upon herself and cannot break free of it. "My mother's history," she admits painfully, "weighs on me like a bag of dead birds."

Ironically, it is in dead birds that Ava begins to find relief. Upon graduation from college she travels as a volunteer to the Salton Sea, an inland lake 105 miles northeast of San Diego, and joins a group of conservationists struggling to save the many species of birds dying along the shore from agriculturally induced botulism.

The sea is a desolate place. "The beach is not sandy as I had supposed," Ava discovers, "but salt encrusted, heaped with barnacles that crunch underfoot."

She is immediately sickened by the overpowering stench, but continues on. The jetties and the crude bird hospitals are "stacked with dead and dying pelicans, a seething clump of beige and brown. Some convulse violently, others have already started to decompose."

Trying to save the stricken birds is heartbreaking work. They can't hold their heads up and fall to the beach unable to walk. Their eyes become caked with mud and salt and dung, which the workers wash off as best they can. At the end of the day, Ava and the other volunteers retire to their sweltering tent and hold what they call a "scent party" to get the death smell out of their noses. "Old Spice deodorant . . . eucalyptus seeds . . . coconut suntan oil . . . instant coffee . . . Vicks VapoRub."

Despite the heat and the stench of death and decay, Ava stays and fights for the birds. Her volunteerism gradually takes her out of herself, and eventually purges the guilt and despair adopted from her mother. Working alongside her daughter, Helen also finds redemption. And there's a bonus. Ava's tenderness with the birds awakens in her a tenderness toward humans she had never felt, which finally enables her to give and accept physical love.

The tally of birds lost at the sea totals 14,131 - the worst die-off in recorded American history. Borrowing from older rituals of people gathering to call out the names of those dead from AIDS, Ava and her newfound friends assemble on the beach and call out the number and species of birds that have died.

"Northern pintail 27 . . . black-bellied plover 4 . . . Western sandpiper 190 . . . California gull 25 . . . black skimmer 18 . . . brown pelicans 1,129 . . . white pelicans 8,538 . . . " The roll call goes on and on. "I felt the dignity of all the birds pass through me," mourns Ava when the reading is complete. "I felt my own heartbeat trail after them."

It is exciting in literacy circles when a first-time novelist does well, as Brandeis does with The Book of Dead Birds. Naturally, the story is not without flaws. There's too much unnecessary dialogue: "Hello. How are you? I'm fine, how about you? I'm fine, thanks." And the murders of two unknown women by an equally unknown killer serves no purpose. But how splendidly the author has balanced art with environmental obligation.

We will surely hear from Brandeis again.

William Dieter is the author of four novels and a retired writing teacher. He lives in Denver.