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lauronhaney 's review for:
Midnight at the Blackbird Café
by Heather Webber
Let me start by saying that this is the FAVORITE book of someone in my book club, and perhaps my cold, dead heart is just incapable of uncomplicated enjoyment anymore. This could be a valid assessment, but I don't think it is entirely the case here.
We're going to start with the heavy hitter- To disappoint Regina George, I have to ask, why are you all white? Despite the book being set in a fictional town in Alabama, none of the human characters are explicitly POC, and there is nary a mention of physical characteristics that would suggest it either. In other locations in the US, that might not feels as obtrusive, but if you live in an all-white town in Alabama, there is some insidious history there. This is more than doubled down by one of the main narrators mentioning that she was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy (as if it was nothing!) early in the book in the same sentence she mentioned being a member of the Junior League. This was never analyzed or discussed again, leading me to believe that the author simply picked this as a "Southern thing" and has no idea that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and others consider the Daughters of the Confederacy intrinsically white supremacist and part of the Neo-Confederacy movement. The alternative is that the author explicitly knew what she was doing here and did so intentionally. To each their own judgement, but big oof.
Okay, let's say you can ignore all I wrote above- There are other issues I had here too, namely the "Southernisms" throughout the book. This book screamed southern stereotypes at me. From the line, “We survive on sweet tea and complaining, plain and simple. Mostly the sweet tea, if I’m tellin’ it to you straight.” to the literal pearl clutching to the teenage girl running around town without shoes on to the hundreds (?) of times the phrase "Bless your heart" was used in a nice way- it felt overdone. In other ways, the book was extremely lacking in things that made up at least my southern experiences. "Bless your heart" was never used in the backhanded way (where the phrase truly holds its power), and not a single person invited Anna Kate to church with them. The heat, humidity, and pollen aren't even mentioned until about 20% into the book. With one of the primary narrators having just moved there from Massachusetts, there is no way it would not be the very first thing on her mind. The whole thing felt disingenuous.
Finally, as a personal preference/judgement here- You have a way to make people possibly get messages from dead relatives and absolutely no one is using this to solve murders or find out where the treasure is hidden? The set-up was intriguing, but the revelations it brought about were rarely more complex than things that could have been accomplished by a gut feeling or a simple conversation. Why establish this as a situation where "There's really magic in this! Really!" but do so little with it once it has been established? The magical realism aspects of the book were underutilized and hardly affected the (barely there) plot in a way that disappointed me and left me with a lot of unexplored questions.
I know other people found this book absolutely wonderful, but, at the very least, this was not the book for me.
We're going to start with the heavy hitter- To disappoint Regina George, I have to ask, why are you all white? Despite the book being set in a fictional town in Alabama, none of the human characters are explicitly POC, and there is nary a mention of physical characteristics that would suggest it either. In other locations in the US, that might not feels as obtrusive, but if you live in an all-white town in Alabama, there is some insidious history there. This is more than doubled down by one of the main narrators mentioning that she was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy (as if it was nothing!) early in the book in the same sentence she mentioned being a member of the Junior League. This was never analyzed or discussed again, leading me to believe that the author simply picked this as a "Southern thing" and has no idea that organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and others consider the Daughters of the Confederacy intrinsically white supremacist and part of the Neo-Confederacy movement. The alternative is that the author explicitly knew what she was doing here and did so intentionally. To each their own judgement, but big oof.
Okay, let's say you can ignore all I wrote above- There are other issues I had here too, namely the "Southernisms" throughout the book. This book screamed southern stereotypes at me. From the line, “We survive on sweet tea and complaining, plain and simple. Mostly the sweet tea, if I’m tellin’ it to you straight.” to the literal pearl clutching to the teenage girl running around town without shoes on to the hundreds (?) of times the phrase "Bless your heart" was used in a nice way- it felt overdone. In other ways, the book was extremely lacking in things that made up at least my southern experiences. "Bless your heart" was never used in the backhanded way (where the phrase truly holds its power), and not a single person invited Anna Kate to church with them. The heat, humidity, and pollen aren't even mentioned until about 20% into the book. With one of the primary narrators having just moved there from Massachusetts, there is no way it would not be the very first thing on her mind. The whole thing felt disingenuous.
Finally, as a personal preference/judgement here- You have a way to make people possibly get messages from dead relatives and absolutely no one is using this to solve murders or find out where the treasure is hidden? The set-up was intriguing, but the revelations it brought about were rarely more complex than things that could have been accomplished by a gut feeling or a simple conversation. Why establish this as a situation where "There's really magic in this! Really!" but do so little with it once it has been established? The magical realism aspects of the book were underutilized and hardly affected the (barely there) plot in a way that disappointed me and left me with a lot of unexplored questions.
I know other people found this book absolutely wonderful, but, at the very least, this was not the book for me.