#Titanuary #BookReview ‘The Blackbird Season’ by Kate Moretti

About the book…

‘The Blackbird Season’ was published by Titan in 2017, both in paperback and ebook editions.

Where did they come from? Why did they fall? The question would be asked a thousand times….Until, of course, more important questions arose, at which time everyone promptly forgot that a thousand birds fell on the town of Mount Oanoke at all.

In a quiet Pennsylvania town, a thousand dead starlings fall onto a high school baseball field, unleashing a horrifying and unexpected chain of events that will rock the close-knit community.

Beloved baseball coach and teacher Nate Winters and his wife, Alecia, are well respected throughout town. That is until one of the many reporters investigating the bizarre bird phenomenon catches Nate embracing a wayward student, Lucia Hamm, in front of a sleazy motel. Lucia soon buoys the scandal by claiming that she and Nate are engaged in an affair, throwing the town into an uproar…and leaving Alecia to wonder if her husband has a second life.

And when Lucia suddenly disappears, the police have only one suspect: Nate.

Nate’s coworker and sole supporter, Bridget Harris, Lucia’s creative writing teacher, is determined to prove his innocence. She has Lucia’s class journal, and while some of the entries appear particularly damning to Nate’s case, others just don’t add up. Bridget knows the key to Nate’s exoneration and the truth of Lucia’s disappearance lie within the walls of the school and in the pages of that journal.

”Sometimes Bridget thought that the whispers of idle gossip actually powered the town.They’d thrill in stringing up one of their own,maybe even more than an outsider.So much further to fall.”

The almost uncanniness of Nate being caught with Lucia is happenstance of the highest order-some might say it is a coincidence, however, life plays you like that sometimes. Getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time is totally believable…

The birds and the aftermath of their fall from the skies neatly mirrors the fall from grace of everyone’s favourite teacher.

The birds are where it began…but this is so much more than a whodunnit, this is a searing exposition of the trapped feeling of small town life. When things happen, the whole deck of cards is scattered to the four winds as people turn on each other. A chance photo taken by a journalist throws the lives of pretty much everyone in sharp relief as, ironically, the girl who set the whole thing in motion, vanishes and ceases to be more than a conduit in her own tale.

”You were no one if you were poor in this town.More accurately,you were just like everyone else who didn’t matter.’

What I loved about this book is how honest it is. The characters are shaded, there are no white and black hats. Nate’s wife, Alecia, is not a likeable person. She is 100% engaged in the life of their son, Gabe, who is autistic, at one point she is accused by her mother in law of abandoning her son in favour of theirs.

It’s understandable, this is a woman who is grief-stricken by the loss of her relationship with her husband, and the loss of the child she expected. However, when she is railing against Nate for buying beer on a weekly basis, after blowing 400 dollars in an attempt to make herself feel better, sympathy for her is hard to come by.

As the accusations of ‘insitutional sexual assault’ swirl around Nate, the only one who is certain he did not overstep teacher/pupil boundaries is his friend, Bridget. Bridget herself is recovering from the death of her husband from pancreatic cancer and is the sole support which Nate has-the school immediately turn on Nate, protecting their reputation and the senior scholars becomes their priority.

Lucia Hamm, the girl at the center of the story, the one who declared they were having an affair, is the recipient of so  much vitriol and hatred that it made me wince. Unstable-partly by self sabotage and partly because of abuse she has suffered-she represents the archetypal outsider, the one who is whispered about, a graffitied name on bathroom doors, the one no one looks for in a hurry when she vanishes. As she even says in her diary-

”Remember the witch,they’d say.She just-poof-disappeared. Later the story would change because it sounded better:she disappeared the same day the birds fell.”

The story bounces between Nate,Bridget,Alecia and Lucia’s diary as it comes to a tumultuous climax where the scab is pulled off the wound for all to see. It’s so incredibly sad how the claustrophobic nature creates an atmosphere where a town eats its young. I could not put this book down until I foudn out what happened, it dragged me in, sucked me under and did not let go.

This is the first Kate Moretti book that I have read,I am looking forward to another of hers on my Titanuary shelf, ‘In Her Bones’.

About the author…

Kate Moretti lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two kids, and a dog. She’s worked in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years as a scientist, and has been an avid fiction reader her entire life.

She enjoys traveling and cooking, although with two kids, a day job, and writing, she doesn’t get to do those things as much as she’d like.

Her lifelong dream is to buy an old house with a secret passageway.

Twitter @TitanBooks @KateMoretti1

Links-http://www.katemoretti.com/