Book Review: In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters

Title: In the Shadow of Blackbirds
Author: Cat Winters
Published: New York: Amulet Books, 2013
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 385
Total Page Count: 190,945
Text Number: 565
Read Because: local author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 16-year-old Mary Shelley Black comes to San Diego in the height of World War I, an influenza outbreak, and the rise of spiritualism, there to find the death of a loved one test her skepticism.

"Oh, you silly, naïve men." I shook my weary head and genuinely pitied their ignorance. "You've clearly never been a sixteen-year-old girl in the fall of 1918."

This is a novel entrenched in its historical setting, in spiritualism and the pervasive death that birthed it. It grows into a ghost story, adopting a suitable gothic/paranormal tone, and the whodunnit, carefully integrated into historical context, is only somewhat undermined by a rushed, neat conclusion. The atmosphere is strong, but the emotional register is always a bit off—characters over-emote, dialog is heavy-handed, and, while Mary Shelley proves to be delightful, the exaggerated tone keeps the story at arm's length, insufficiently convincing or compelling. In both setting and content, this is remarkably similar to Frances Hardinge's Cuckoo Song—if you like one, try the other. But I found that In the Shadow of Blackbirds failed to coalesce.


While I'm at it, another list no one asked for!

Literature, music, and a few historical figures mentioned in In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winter
in order of appearance, approximately exhaustive

H.G. Wells
The Mysterious Island, Around the World in Eighty Days, and other work, Jules Verne
White Fang, Jack London
"The Passions", William Collins
McGuffey Readers
Fairytales of Ludwig Tieck
Fairytales of the Brother Grimm
Goethe
Eichendorff
Rilke
Herman Hesse
Bach
Strauss
Beethoven
Wager
"Lullaby," Brahms
A Treasury of War Poetry, ed. George Herbert Clarke, specifically: "The Death of Peace," Ronald Ross; "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," Alan Seeger; "The Hell-Gate of Soissons," Herbert Kaufman; "Into Battle," Julian Grenfell; "The Trenches," Frederic Manning
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as historical figure)
Duncan MacDougall, physician
Cottingley Fairies, photographed by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths
Chaucer
Milton
Tolstoy
Melville
Hawthorne
Bunyan
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
The Pirates of Penzance
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Oz series, L. Frank Baum
"Sing a Song of Sixpence"
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (as allusion)
"The Star-Spangled Banner"