Blackbirds

Blackbirds introduces us to Miriam Black, a Girl with Issues living the roadie lifestyle. Number one issue: being able to see how people die. Number two issue: the firm belief that "Fate gets what Fate wants." Things are trucking along fine for Miriam until she meets Louis, and sees herself somehow involved in his death. She gets about as far away from him as possible and in the process runs into issue number three: Ashley Gaynes. These three circle each other throughout the novel, bringing Miriam closer to a fate she doesn't understand and wants desperately to prevent. But fate gets what fate wants.

For the most part, the novel moves the reader along at a nice snappy pace. The interview interludes stick out the most because while they give necessary background, they ultimately go nowhere and do not connect to the main plot thread at all. We have no idea when or where the interview takes place, so these interludes seem random. It feels like Wendig couldn't figure out any other way to include important backstory, so he just stuck these in whenever he wanted to slow the plot/pace down a bit. This is the novel's biggest flaw.

There's also a few perspective shifts that can be quite jarring, mainly because there are so few. While the novel generally follows Miriam's perspective of events, it's important to note that it's the author's voice we are actually hearing. He doesn't get close enough to Miriam to let her tell her own story. But where Bacigalupi fails in this respect (see previous post), Wendig does not. There is a lot of violence and some sex in this novel, but I never felt that he exploits Miriam the way Bacigalupi does with Emiko in The Windup Girl. I also deeply and sincerely appreciate that Wending does not rape Miriam in order to give her even more issues and that he gives her a fairly intense sexuality but does not punish her for it narratively. In this respect, Blackbirds was an excellent novel for me to read coming off such a reading funk. It showed me that a male author can write a female character who is a total badass with issues without making rape a necessary aspect of her character. Thank you, Chuck Wendig.

Wendig has fairly significant cult following, at least from what I've seen on the Great Interwebs. He's a great blogger (all the 25 things posts are well worth reading) and a pretty prolific author as well. All the chatter and hype about the Miriam Black series set my expectations pretty high, but I was slightly underwhelmed by Blackbirds. It was a good story, but I'm not sure Miriam is compelling enough for me to want to come back to her. I would like to see how she got this ability, since it was only hinted at in the backstory. And I'm slightly curious to see what she'll do with the new rules of it. Well, shit, maybe I'll just have to put Mockingbird on my library hold list now.