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.
