The Blackbird Season

The description of this book is what caught my attention. A teacher accused of having sex with his high school student, a thousand starling's falling from the sky and a missing girl...
The story is told from alternating views of Nate, the teacher accused of having an affair with Lucia, his student. Lucia is living with an abusive brother and is barely able to cope with life in small town Pennsylvania. Alecia is married to Nate and is now consumed by her autistic son who demands most of her time and attention. Finally Bridget, is the best friend and fellow teacher who is the only one that truly believes Nate is innocent. She has her own demons and struggles to connect to Alecia who questions why her husband would be so involved in his show more students lives.
I was riveted to this book. The suspense built up slowly, but the writing was so enjoyable. I was disappointed in the books abrupt ending. Wish their had been an epilogue to tie up loose ends. However, the book was a thrilling mystery. I received a complimentary ebook from Netgalley.com in exchange for a review show less

The Blackbird Season begins with an eerie event that seems like an omen to the townspeople of Mount Oanoke – a harbinger that seems fulfilled when popular high school math teacher Nate Winters is accused of having an affair with Lucia Hamm, one of his students. Even his wife Alecia doesn’t know whether to believe him, though she is so exhausted by working with their son Gabe who is autistic, she doesn’t really have time to think.

Two people instinctively believe Nate, his friend Tripp, a local police officer, and his colleague, an English teacher named Bridget. Both are friends of Nate’s who just can’t believe it. There’s some damaging evidence arising from Nate’s efforts to help Lucia who was being battered by her show more heroin-addict brother and living rough at an abandoned mill. He rented a motel room for her on a cold night before urging her to go to a shelter. When Lucia is missing and Nate is the last to see her, things look grim.

The Blackbird Season is a fair mystery. We get all the clues and when we discover the facts, they make sense. The overall mystery meets the requirements of a fair story and is resolved. That part is almost beside the point. Sure it has to happen, but the heart of the story is exploring friendship, marriage, and community. The fractures in Nate and Alecia’s marriage were there before there was a hint of suspicion.

I admired the harsh reality of being the mother of an autistic child portrayed in this book. Not many novels will talk about how gross it is dealing with five-year-olds who shit their pants and flat out say, that’s a lot more shit than when babies do it. The impossible challenge of trying to make her child more “normative” is making Alecia lose herself and her marriage. There is some real authenticity to this part of the story that makes me believe Moretti knows some people and isn’t just drawing on research.

The story is very readable and fast-paced. I read it in two sittings and was completely engrossed. I like most of the people, though I don’t think Nate Winters is as good a teacher as he thinks he is. He transgresses the norms of teaching and thinks that makes him a better teacher, but it does not. It made him vulnerable, but it also prevented him from following the Mandated Reporter law that applies in Pennsylvania as it does in every single state and U.S. territory.

In fact, it seems all the teachers at Mount Oanoke fail their students and in particular, fail Lucia. A student comes to school with cigarette burns and bruises and not one person calls child services? Everyone knows the father has been gone for two years and no one calls child services? What is wrong with these people? It does not matter that when this happens Lucia is eighteen, they note she is still an institutional minor when accusing Nate, but not when it comes to physical abuse? This is not just incompetence, this is criminal neglect on the part of every school employee. Nate is the worst because we know he is aware of it and tries to deal with it by finding her a shelter, not by alerting the authorities. The others seem to close their eyes, to choose not to see. Nate sees, and still fails her.

This book is well-written and I was interested in the story. I liked Nate’s friends and even liked Nate. I don’t think kindness is a pathology. I cared about the people. But it does have a few plot devices that I dislike. False rape allegations are vanishingly rare, but they seem to happen far too often in fiction. Police taking her allegation seriously is equally unrepresentative of reality. I am not fond of the Evil Lolita trope and wish the story had taken another turn because Moretti is a good writer.

The Blackbird Season will be released September 26th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley

The Blackbird Season at Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint
Kate Moretti author page

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/9781501118456/ show less

Nate Winters is a dedicated high school mathematics teacher who also coaches the baseball team. He and his wife, Alecia, have a five-year-old special-needs son, Gabe. Alecia expends a great deal of time and money helping Gabe; he has frequent therapy sessions designed to improve his ability to focus and interact with others. Thanks to Nate's unwise habit of getting too close to his students—he gives them his cell number and monitors their social media posts—he lands in serious trouble. He has paid too much attention to a troubled young woman named Lucia Hamm ("on the fringe, but exotically, unsettlingly beautiful") and rumor has it that Nate and Lucia are romantically involved. When Lucia disappears, Nate is suspended and becomes show more the target of a police investigation. Bridget Peterson, a friend of Nate and Alecia's and a lonely widow who teaches English in Nate's school, is caught in the middle of this melodrama. She fears that the ugly articles in the newspaper and the hastiness of gossipmongers to believe the worst about Nate may spell the end of her colleague's career and marriage.

Kate Moretti's "The Blackbird Season" is set in Mt. Oanoke, a small Pennsylvania town that has declined economically since its once prosperous paper mill closed ten years earlier. The teenagers who can go away to college are eager to escape this stifling place. Besides going back and forth in time, Moretti assigns various chapters to particular characters, giving us an opportunity to evaluate the story from different perspectives. Is Alecia too wrapped up in Gabe to sustain her marriage? Is Lucia so distraught about her miserable existence that she will do anything to get attention? Who among Lucia's classmates has something to hide? When a large number of starlings fall down from the sky, the townspeople are understandably alarmed. It is as if a curse has descended upon them.

Moretti has written a compelling story about the challenges of living in a claustrophobic environment where everyone knows everyone else's business. The author ably depicts teenage cliques in constant flux; the easy access that adolescents have to sex, drugs, and alcohol; and the willingness of neighbors to declare a person guilty based on innuendo. The writing, unfortunately, is uneven, and the second half is padded with too much exposition. In this downbeat work of fiction, the adolescents and their adult counterparts make imprudent decisions that come back to haunt them. Can they extricate themselves from the predicaments they helped create before it is too late? show less

When hundreds of dead starlings fall out of the sky, curious reporters flock to the grim scene - a baseball field in a small, down-on-its-luck Pennsylvania town. The birds prove to be a bad omen for local high school teacher, Nate Winters. One of the reporters spots him with a student named Lucia at a seedy motel, and then Lucia disappears. His wife Alecia is already at her wits' end, and the accusations against her husband are too much to bear. It seems the only person Nate has to defend him is fellow teacher and friend, Bridget Harris, who's read Lucia's troubling journal in class.

The mystery about what happened to Lucia was an intriguing one. The story is told by Nate, Alecia, Bridget, and Lucia in alternating chapters. Other than show more Bridget, none of them were particularly likable, thought their predicaments held my interest. Something that was a bit jarring was how the dates/time jumped around from chapter to chapter. I had to go back several times to remind myself when something previous had happened. I think with four POVs the time jumps got confusing.

The setting of this book really stood out to me. The author captured the perfect dark and gritty atmosphere of a dying town with an abandoned mill. It gave me a feeling of unease throughout. I only wish the starlings had played a bigger part in the book. THE BLACKBIRD SEASON is a character-driven mystery with plenty of drama. Not a lot of big surprises, but it did keep me guessing.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

An interesting mystery. The alternating POVs confused me at the beginning of the story as I tried to figure out who was who but I appreciated them as the story continued. I love that Kate manages to keep you guessing about Nate's innocence right up to the reveal.

Looking forward to reading more of Kate Moretti's work in the future.

A husband, a father, a teacher, a coach, and now a suspended teacher accused of having an affair with a student.

Did it really happen, though, or did Lucia make it up?

Nate was always involved with this students on a personal level and helped the ones who appeared to be in distress. Did this backfire on him?

THE BLACKBIRD SEASON is mainly about the characters and their lives after the blackbirds fell and after Lucia disappeared. Did Lucia have anything to do with the blackbirds falling from the sky or did the blackbirds have anything to do with Lucia's disappearance? Her fellow students do call her a witch.

THE BLACKBIRD SEASON is considered a thriller, but it didn't seem like a thriller to me. I saw it more as an investigation into show more people's lives and what some people have to go through on a daily basis or during a crisis.

Addressing teenagers and their behavior was a major theme as well.

The book has four main narrators, and we hear from each one and how each one is connected to each other and to the situation.

The intrigue for me was in the behavior of the characters. The characters did grow on you toward the end as you became familiar with their lives instead of feeling annoyed with them.

Nate seemed to be too helpful for his own good.

Poor Alecia was so overwhelmed with her special needs child and had no clue about anything her husband, Nate, did.

Bridget, still mourning the loss of her husband, seemed genuine and a bit shaky about the situation Nate was in since he was a good friend.

Lucia was a troubled teenager with a bad home life and a teenager who needed attention and got attention in the wrong way.

The flocks of blackbirds seemed to serve as the background for the ominous situations that occurred in the small, gossip-ridden, mill town of Mt. Oanoke, Pennsylvania.

The book kept my interest because I wanted to see what happened to Lucia and if Nate would be found innocent. The suspense definitely was not edge-of-your-seat.

If you enjoy digging into the lives of folks and their emotions along with a lot of questionable choices, THE BLACKBIRD SEASON should be a good read for you.

Let me know what you think of this book. I started out with a rating of 3/5, but raised it to a 4/5 because the ending was suspenseful.

This book was given to me free of charge and without compensation by the publisher and Net Galley in return for an honest review. show less

The Blackbird Season by Kate Moretti is a highly recommended mystery/drama.

When a thousand starlings fall out of the sky, dead, on the town of Mount Oanoke PA during a high school baseball game coached by Nate Winters, it seems to be the beginning of things that are going to go wrong for the popular math teacher. A reporter in town investigating the mysterious die off of birds has seen Nate embracing Lucia, a high school student, While Nate has been, according to him, helping the young woman, his wife, Alicia, has been at home struggling to take care of their 5-year-old autistic son, Gabe.

Alecia's friend and Nate’s coworker, Bridget Harris, is a creative writing teacher at the high school and knows both Nate and the girl. She has show more witnessed some suspect actions, but she is also trying to keep an open mind. When the girl, Lucia, goes missing, Bridget tries to find her and enlists the police. But the police are seeing only one suspect in her disappearance, Nate, and the fragile bonds between husband and wife and friends is near a breaking point as the town seems to rally against him.

In this character-driven drama, the story is told from the point of views of Nate, Alicia, Lucia, and Bridget. This helps keep the reader guessing and ratchets up the suspense as more clues are discovered and more information comes out. Moretti is an excellent writer and handles the transition between characters beautifully. Of the characters, though, Bridget is the only one I even remotely cared about. Everyone else resembled a caricature rather than a real person.

The ending was good for me, although I did struggle a bit with getting there. I must admit I am becoming a wee bit tired of this plot (male teacher/female student dead) and adding annoying characters to the well-worn path didn't help me traverse it. What did help propel me through the novel was the quality of the writing and looking at the plot from the different character's points of view.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Atria Books.
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