Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe and Other June Reads

I finished 11 books in the month of June:

Transforming Classroom Grading by Robert J. Marzano
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand
How to Teach so Students Remember by Marilee Sprenger
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab
Personalizing the High School Experience by Joseph DiMartino and John H. Clarke
Whisper Network by Chandler Baker (eARC)
Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning by Judy Willis, M.D.
Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber (ARC)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This month has been a strange mix of classics I somehow managed to miss reading in high school, new(ish) releases, and craft books. Otherwise known as summer of a high school teacher!

My favorite ARC this month was Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe. I’ve included my full review below.
My review for Whisper Network can be found here.

I received a copy of Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber from the publisher (Forge) in exchange for an honest review. Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is scheduled for release on July 16, 2019.

Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe follows two young women in a small Alabama town. Anna Kate is a temporary addition to the community, only in town to settle her grandmother’s estate, which includes a required stint running The Blackbird Cafe. Natalie is a local girl who moved away and is back again. Most of our time is with Anna Kate, following her as she struggles to figure out what relationships she wants with the members of the small community (including her father’s family), and who she wants to be herself.

For me, the best part of this book was the town of Wicklow. It’s a small southern town that has begun to collapse as people and jobs move away. It’s a town steeped in sweet tea, gossip, and magic. Much of the story takes place in the cafe, focusing on the quirky mix of people that spend time there. I felt like I knew that place. Like I could find Wicklow on a map and show up on the doorsteps of the cafe any given morning and be able to identify the people I saw through the window.

There are definitely some southern stereotypes in the cast of characters. What made them work is the characters seeing their own behaviors and beginning to question them, beginning to change and grow. I would have like to see a little more development of some of these characters, particularly Natalie. She is presented to us as a primary character, but I didn’t feel like I knew her as well as Anna Kate at the end.

The plot of this story does contain some mystery. In a town that seems to thrive on gossip, information is plentiful, but often incomplete and of questionable validity. Some pieces of the mystery I figured out ahead, but others I wasn’t sure that I had a clear answer for by the end. Part of this was a bit of confusion for me in some of the plot. There are several characters who are not in the present of the story. One of them died in a boating accident. All of the rest died in a variety of car crashes. This similarity in deaths led to a lack of clarity for me in who was who and who was where in the past, especially since we never met these characters directly.

In the end, Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is a story about love. Love for family. Love for friends. Love for humanity in general. Anna Kate and her new community find the power of love to heal both individuals and a whole community.