The Blackbird Season by Kate Moretti - Review

Title: The Blackbird Season

Author: Kate Moretti

Pages:352

Publishing: September 26th 2017 by Atria Books

ISBN:1501118455 

Synopsis:

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, Alicia, 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 Alicia to wonder if her husband has a second life.

And when Lucia suddenly disappears, the police only to have 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.

Told from the alternating points of view of Alicia, Nate, Lucia, and Bridget, The Blackbird Season is a haunting, psychologically nuanced suspense, filled with Kate Moretti’s signature “chillingly satisfying” (Publishers Weekly) twists and turns.

Review:

Kate Moretti is quickly becoming an auto buy author for me. I loved her novel The Vanishing Year, so I was incredibly excited to get my hands on a copy of her newest novel The Blackbird Season. This novel has a little bit of a different feel to it, but it was equally as addicting. I had a physical copy as well as an ebook, so I was constantly reading it whenever I had a free moment.

The characters in The Blackbird Season are a little difficult to pin down. By this, I mean some were difficult to trust, others were difficult to like, and then some were just difficult to understand. I liked that aspect of the novel, but it made it a little harder to get truly invested in the novel.

I loved that Moretti used different narrators throughout the novel, it really added to the intrigue and left the reader constantly guessing. All in all, the novel was fast paced and had a lot of twists and turns, but I had a hard time really connecting with the characters. It was full of suspense and thrills and I would recommend it to readers who enjoy psychological thrillers. Thank you to Atria and Kate Moretti for sending this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Rating 3/5