Locke pens a poignant love letter to the lazy red-dirt roads and Piney Woods that serve as a backdrop to a noir thriller as murky as the bayous and bloodlines that thread through the region.… Locke shows off her chops as a superb storyteller.… She is adept at crafting characters who don't easily fit the archetypes of good and evil, but exist in the thick grayness of humanness, the knotty demands of loyalties and the baseness of survival. Streaked with wit and hard-earned wisdom, Bluebird, Bluebird soars.Īttica Locke's terrific Bluebird, Bluebird simmers with racial tension.… story told with Locke's crystal-clear vision and pleasurably elemental prose. Pushing her classic noir plot deep into history and culture, the Houston native sings her own unshakable, timeless lament. It rises above 'left and right' and 'black and white' and follows the threads that inevitably bind us together, even as we rip them apart.Īttica Locke's stupendous fourth novel is suffused with the blues. Those places are complicated.Īn emotionally dense and intricately detailed thriller, roiling with conflicting emotions steeped in this nation's troubled past and present.… A rich sense of place and relentless feeling of dread permeate Attica Locke's heartbreakingly resonant new novel about race and justice in America.… Bluebird, Bluebird is no simple morality tale. Still, those truths are not necessarily the evidence one finds in a murder investigation in a small town in Texas. Locke is a brisk writer with a sharp eye for the subtleties of how rural white Southerners tend to act as if their little towns belong to them - and react harshly to black independence. There is injustice here - institutional racism that has its roots in Texas’s history as a confederate state and continues today.… In slow yet gripping chapters, Locke studies the impact of racism on a small town and its people. Racial tensions are at the core of this elegant thriller, set in Shelby County, Texas. Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style.

The good news is that Bluebird, Bluebird is the first in a planned series with Darren Matthews in the lead, and that’s something to look forward to. Laced with flashbacks and bedeviled with twists and turns, the plot propels readers to the end. Attica Lock is a highly gifted author whose prose - steeped at times in idiom and lyricism yet sparse and lucid at others - is a joy to read.

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