Book Review: Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber

 

Midnight at the Blackbird Café

by Heather Webber

When Anna Kate’s grandmother, Zee, passes away, she has no choice but to return to Wicklow, Alabama and work the Blackbird Café for two months in order to receive her inheritance. But there’s a reason her mama, Eden, left Wicklow when Anna Kate was little. Anna Kate is bound for medical school in August but first she is going to have to face these old ghosts, and the birds.

There’s something special about the birds that give The Blackbird Café its name. The legend has it that the women in Anna Kate’s family have to listen to the birds and then when people eat the pie they bake, they will dream of messages from deceased loved ones.

Birders descend on the town, having heard about the blackbirds, rare enough in Alabama. Rarer still is that the birds only appear from midnight to one am to sing.

Anna Kate doesn’t have any immediate family left. Her father died in a car crash when her mother was still pregnant. Her mother passed just a few years ago, and now her grandmother has died. But there is more family out there for her, if she can bridge the divide.

Anna Kate’s paternal family, The Lindens, includes her grandfather, Doc Linden, grandmother, Seelie, and an Aunt Natalie who is not all that much older than Anna Kate herself.

Natalie has had some trauma of her own. Her husband died under less than clear circumstances and she has a three-year-old daughter to raise on her own now so she moved back home for help, though she and her mother, Seelie, don’t see eye to eye.

“If my mother knew where I was going, she’d undoubtedly clutch her signature double strand of pearls, purse her lips, and vociferously question the heavens above as to where she had gone wrong raising her only daughter.”

Anna Kate’s grandmother, and Natalie’s mother, Seelie Linden, is an old-fashioned proper southern belle who was dead set against her son marrying Eden, and when A.J. died in a car accident, she blamed Eden.

This book is filled with wonderful characters. The ones who are no longer living are often as intriguing as the ones Anna Kate comes in contact with. It is a huge cast but each person feels real and individual in their own right.

There’s Faylene, a town busybody who means well and actually knows a lot. She quickly volunteers to babysit for Natalie while she takes care of her own granddaughter. Gordon was Zee’s lawyer and lives next door to the café. He seems sweet on Anna Kate and she is more than a little interested, but it’s all VERY restrained. Mr. Lazenby requires his daily piece of pie in order to dream of his deceased wife. Aubin Pavageau was Anna Kate’s father’s best friend growing up. He’s friendly but suffering from his own trauma after his wife died a few years before in a car accident. Then there’s a mysterious bird with a broken wing about town, and a ragged old gray cat that acts like it understands far more than any cat has a right to.

 This is a book as full of flavor as any of the pies Anna Kate serves in the Blackbird Café. I highly recommend.