Bluebird, Bluebird

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.