Bluebird, Bluebird

For some reason this simply didn't catch fire for me.

Part of the appeal of this book, to me, was its setting. It brought back the piney woods of East Texas, my hometown, perfectly, for good and for bad. But even if you aren't from there, you'll enjoy it if you like a good mystery, though where it not based on the piney woods I likely would have rated it a 3-star.

Edgar Award Winner, Best Novel 2018! This was very good. Big surprise near end (Won't tell you), Great characters and locations. I see that Attica Locke has been nominated for different awards for her other novels, I'm putting her on my Favorite Author's List. If you like mysteries you should like this! David

Another one that took me more than halfway to really get into it. (Starting to wonder if that's just a pregnancy brain thing...)

I spent my first 17 years living in the Dallas suburbs, and five more after college in a university town halfway between Austin and Houston, but this was a new Texas to me, and one I didn't immediately recognize. I kept wanting to scooch the story further into the past — where tiny towns like Lark seem to fit in my brain — and then references to President Obama and modern technology would hurl me back into the present.

There's a lot of environment-building, family history, historical setup in the beginning. This is very much a story about race resentment wrapped up in a thriller, but the thriller part came way later. I'm not entirely sure I needed Randie as a character, and up until the end I might have said that about Greg too — but I've been learning about how white people (like myself) take advantage of the friendship of POC, and thinking about whether or not POC actually need or want more white people as friends, and there was this perfectly written moment near the end when Darren realizes that his lifelong friend cares more about getting ahead at work on Darren's back than he does about actual flesh-and-blood Darren, and it really hammered home that message that we have to be careful about what our impact is on the people around us (because our intent doesn't matter when it comes to someone else's hurt).

Once we got into the meat of the mystery — two murders, a black man and a white woman, both thrown into the same bayou behind a roadside cafe owned by a black family, and the local police force only wants to investigate the woman's murder, and Ranger Darren's investigation of both because he's convinced they're connected — it got real good, and fast-paced, and complicated. I didn't see the ending coming, and everything gets wrapped up pretty nicely, EXCEPT ... then the last sentence leaves it open-ended for a sequel and/or series, and the way it wrapped made me shudder. Family is so complicated, ya'll.

And it's complicated because I was raised to see the world without color, and that means most of the time giving other people that are like myself the benefit of the doubt over people who have different life experiences than I do, and you see undercurrents of that throughout the local law-enforcement: the sheriff seeing the intent behind the actions of people he's known his whole life and assuming good, and writing off other viewpoints as crazy because they don't fit a picture of how the world should work.

Sorry this review is kind of disjointed. The book made me think a lot, and I enjoyed the story and the setting, and I'll probably pick up the next book when it's published.

Darren Matthews is a Texas Ranger. He's also on suspension, drinking a little too heavily and clearly on the outs with his wife. And he's black.

Pulled into the tiny town of Lark to look into a double homicide where nothing is as it's seems. It's a local white girl and an affluent, out of town black man. Attica Locke is here to explore the tensions between rural and urban blacks, race in the South, justice and how it splits alongs color lines and the simmering reality of the Aryan Brotherhood.

I'm usually on board for this kind of exploration but I felt Bluebird, Bluebird stumbled within the confines of it's purported genre. It didn't entirely work as a detective story or a thriller and instead read like the first arc of a longer serial.

I received a galley of this book from NetGalley. It has not influenced my thoughts or opinions about this book.

Let me preface this by saying that I liked this book enough that despite having the opportunity to read a galley for free, I'm planning to buy a copy. I would also put this up there as one of my favorite books of 2017.

This book! Holy smokes, how has it taken me this long to read Attica Locke. I loved everything about this book – the strong sense of place, the complicated cast of characters, the racial tension, and how the plot developed. The pacing was perfect – a slow, steady ramp-up before weaving and winding through discoveries. And that ending was incredible.

If I could have, I would have read this book in one sitting. So many of the characters could have been tropes, but Locke made them feel real and flawed but not in an overwrought way. I'd love to see this one adapted for TV.