Bluebird, Bluebird: A Novel<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nMulholland Books<\/p>\n
Hardcover, 978-0-3163-6329-4, (also available as an e-book and on Audible), 320 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n
September 12, 2017<\/p>\n
The tiny town of Lark, deep into East Texas on Highway 59,<\/span> has had two murders in the last week. That\u2019s two more than the last six years. The first body is that of a black man from Chicago, a stranger in town. The second is a white woman, a local, whose body turns up in the bayou behind Geneva Sweet\u2019s Sweets. Geneva Sweet has spent her entire sixty-nine years in Lark, the last several decades running her small diner. Geneva keeps her secrets and minds her own business, but other people are terrified of those secrets and minding her business, too.<\/p>\nDarren Matthews is descended from a line of lawyers and lawmen, most recently working a task force focused on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and one of the few black Texas Rangers. He\u2019s got wife troubles, career troubles, bourbon troubles, and legal troubles; now he\u2019s got Lark troubles. Assigned to investigate the murders in Lark, Darren finds himself stymied by his superiors who maybe don\u2019t want to know what happened in those East Texas woods.<\/p>\n
Bluebird, Bluebird: A Novel<\/span> is the latest thriller, the first in a new series, from best-selling, prize-winning author Attica Locke,<\/span> who is also a writer and producer of the television drama Empire<\/span> and a native of East Texas. Bluebird, Bluebird<\/span> is a timely, modern parable that tackles head-on entrenched arguments regarding the relationship between the law and African-American citizens. Is the law going to save them by protecting them, or do they need protection from the law?<\/p>\nLocke gets our attention with the first line: \u201cGeneva Sweet ran an orange extension cord past Mayva Greenwood,\u201d she writes, \u201cBeloved Wife and Mother, May She Rest with Her Heavenly Father.\u201d And she excels at vivid, just-right similes. These cemetery headstones are \u201cspaced at haphazard and odd angles, like the teeth of a pauper.\u201d Then she conjures the piney woods: the bayous \u201cbrown as an old penny,\u201d clouds \u201claced rust-red, East Texas dirt reflected in the sky,\u201d cypress and Spanish oak, and the dark nights \u201cthick enough to touch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third-person narration, told from Darren\u2019s and Geneva\u2019s points of view, is fast paced and twisty. The tension and menace are visceral. These characters and their struggles feel authentic with their divided loyalties and torn sympathies, their simultaneous love for and shame of their home. Ranger Matthews \u201cwanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live\u201d by the \u201cancient rules of southern living,\u201d the last generation in which a black man\u2019s demeanor could get him killed. Matthews had hoped \u201cchange might trickle down from the White House.\u201d Except, as we have so recently witnessed, \u201cthe opposite had proved to be true.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, to protect and serve, Darren must decide who he is and declare, \u201cI\u2019m Texas, too. They don\u2019t get to decide what this place is.\u201d Bluebird, Bluebird, which takes its title from a John Lee Hooker blues, is a nuanced excavation, and a powerful indictment, of our treatment of race and class disguised as an entertaining and engrossing suspense novel.<\/p>\n
* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n