Krista Reviews: Anna Carey's - "Blackbird"
This twisty, breathless cat-and-mouse thrill ride, told in the second person, follows a girl with amnesia in present-day Los Angeles who is being pursued by mysterious and terrifying assailants.
A girl wakes up on the train tracks, a subway car barreling down on her. With only minutes to react, she hunches down and the train speeds over her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she is, or how she got there. She has a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist of a blackbird inside a box, letters and numbers printed just below: FNV02198. There is only one thing she knows for sure: people are trying to kill her.
On the run for her life, she tries to untangle who she is and what happened to the girl she used to be. Nothing and no one are what they appear to be. But the truth is more disturbing than she ever imagined.
The Maze Runner series meets Code Name Verity, Blackbird is relentless and action-packed, filled with surprising twists.
Kindle Edition, 256 pages
Published September 16th 2014 by HarperTeen (first published September 1st 2014)
Told in first person perspective, the reader is put right in the driver’s seat of this story. We get to “play” the main character throughout and see everything through her eyes. We wake up with no memories and under the wheels of a train. After being rescued, we find a backpack in our possession and messages that advise us to run. Following clues and intuition, we are just one step ahead of people who are hunting us, and we must survive long enough to find out why.
The writing is very fast paced, there is very little down time because the protagonist always has somethone right on her tail. There are friends and foes that reappear throughout the story, but there is very little world building or character development because of the memory loss. The whole story is happening as we live through it. Along with the clues and encounters we get some development to the storyline, but it’s mainly an in-the-moment storyline.
Set in current day Los Angeles we get to tour the city through the main character’s eyes. It is really hard to say much about the book without giving it away because you have to live through the experiences to really understand the atmosphere . It almost felt like being in a virtual reality video game.
The story really builds up the tension. We don’t know who to trust and we barely survive through a couple of scenes. I really didn’t see the main plot twist coming when it finally does. It made me really excited for the second book and the promise of more of her memories being revealed. I found Blackbird exciting and fun; a great book for if you are looking for something a bit different.
