Sunday 10 August 2014

Blackbirds - Book Rant


Blackbirds (Miriam Black #1)
by Chuck Wendig


What is it about:
Miriam Black knows when you will die.

She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides.

But when Miriam hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and she will be the next victim.

No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.


What did I think of it:
This is one of those books that everyone is raving about, and I wanted to love it, but it just wasn't for me.

I really, really disliked Miriam. She is not a nice person. Ok: so she has it hard, seeing other people's deaths, and that might have made her the person she is, but that doesn't mean I have to like her, let alone root for her.

And then later on in the story she starts working together with another really unlikable character...

The only person in this whole book that I liked was Louis, I will confess.

And then there was Ingersoll, a Dutch character...

I don't know what annoyed me more about Ingersoll: his name (not Dutch) or his background. At one point he's musing about his Dutch grandmother who used to pick cranberries and found snake bones in the boggy ground...

I will have to take a wild guess his grandmother must have been from the small island of Terschelling, because that's the only place in the Netherlands that has cranberries (and those ended up there by accident, It's not a native plant). Not that there are many snakes on Terschelling, but who's counting...

That I kept reading until the end was because I wanted to know if at least Louis would survive, or if the one person I actually could root for would meet his gruesome death.

So all in all I didn't much enjoy this book, and I won't be reading any other books in this series.

Why should you read it:
Maybe you have a higher tolerance for unlikable characters than I do.


buy the book from The Book Depository, free delivery

12 comments:

Anachronist said...

No tolerance for unlikeable characters so thank you very much for your rant, I won't read this one. Eh, life.

Blodeuedd said...

Ugh I know, like when I was reading something set in Sweden and of course knew that no..no..still no

Sullivan McPig said...

If people want to use foreign characters, let them do their research!

Beanie Mouse said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Beanie Mouse said...

Ingersoll, brand name for a British watch, subsidiary of a Chinese firm, which went bankrupt in 1921. Yeah, I can see that can be confused for a Dutch name..... on Planet Zog!!

Enbrethiliel said...

+JMJ+

Wow, Sully! You usually manage to say something nice about a book at the end of your review of it, but here you're not pulling any punches!

Half of me wants to stay away from the book now and the other half wants to read it to see exactly how awful it can be. LOL! ;-P

Sullivan McPig said...

@Beanie: LOL
@Enbrethiliel: the book and the characters just really made my blood boil. When trying to come up with something nice to say, I just came up empty.

Jeffe Kennedy said...

Interesting - I wouldn't say you normally have to have tremendously likable characters. You are usually tolerant of flawed characters and don't demand hearts and flowers.

Can't figure the Dutch miss. Odd. But Beanie Mouse, I'm from Planet Zog and "Ingersoll" is a biting insect there. ;-)

Sullivan McPig said...

There is flawed, and there is obnoxious. Someone who hangs around people who soon will die to empty their pockets of cash is the latter. And I do not care how 'evil' those soon to die people are.

Beanie Mouse said...

Oops, didn't mean to offend Zoggian inhabitants......!!

Aurian said...

Lol a book I did not want to read based on the cover already, and now not want to read based on the contents and the fake Dutch character. I am sooo happy there are virtually no snakes here in Holland.

Melissa (My World...in words and pages) said...

When everyone was raving about this book I thought it sounded like one you liked or you didn't. Thanks for sharing. Sorry you didn't enjoy it.