Kate Moretti

Nate Winters is a dedicated high school mathematics teacher who also coaches the baseball team. He and his wife, Alecia, have a five-year-old special-needs son, Gabe. Alecia expends a great deal of time and money helping Gabe; he has frequent therapy sessions designed to improve his ability to focus and interact with others. Thanks to Nate's unwise habit of getting too close to his students—he gives them his cell number and monitors their social media posts—he lands in serious trouble. He has paid too much attention to a troubled young woman named Lucia Hamm ("on the fringe, but exotically, unsettlingly beautiful") and rumor has it that Nate and Lucia are romantically involved. When Lucia disappears, Nate is suspended and becomes the target of a police investigation. Bridget Peterson, a friend of Nate and Alecia's and a lonely widow who teaches English in Nate's school, is caught in the middle of this melodrama. She fears that the ugly articles in the newspaper and the hastiness of gossipmongers to believe the worst about Nate may spell the end of her colleague's career and marriage.

Kate Moretti's "The Blackbird Season" is set in Mt. Oanoke, a small Pennsylvania town that has declined economically since its once prosperous paper mill closed ten years earlier. The teenagers who can go away to college are eager to escape this stifling place. Besides going back and forth in time, Moretti assigns various chapters to particular characters, giving us an opportunity to evaluate the story from different perspectives. Is Alecia too wrapped up in Gabe to sustain her marriage? Is Lucia so distraught about her miserable existence that she will do anything to get attention? Who among Lucia's classmates has something to hide? When a large number of starlings fall down from the sky, the townspeople are understandably alarmed. It is as if a curse has descended upon them.

Moretti has written a compelling story about the challenges of living in a claustrophobic environment where everyone knows everyone else's business. The author ably depicts teenage cliques in constant flux; the easy access that adolescents have to sex, drugs, and alcohol; and the willingness of neighbors to declare a person guilty based on innuendo. The writing, unfortunately, is uneven, and the second half is padded with too much exposition. In this downbeat work of fiction, the adolescents and their adult counterparts make imprudent decisions that come back to haunt them. Can they extricate themselves from the predicaments they helped create before it is too late?… (more)

A haunting ghost story...finally got around to reading one of my previous KindleFirst books (I can't remember from which month anymore). It tells the tale of Hannah Maloney, who goes back to her childhood home in Brackenhill in upstate NY when she gets news that her aunt passed away. She's held lots of secrets from when she lived there, and revisits the mysterious disappearance of her sister, Julia.

The book moves between the present and the past, when Hannah and her sisters were navigating teenage life, and does a good job weaving together the past and present. Great job building up to the climax! I definitely wanted to know what was going to happen next, and I wanted to learn more about the characters in the present, past, and of course, the old castle and what secrets it hid.

The story is told in third person from Hannah's POV.

4 stars because while I enjoyed the story, I couldn't relate much to Hannah as a character, and she made some choices that I disagree with (i.e. her and Wyatt). Otherwise, I loved the setting and the descriptions of small-town upstate NY.… (more)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this great read!

This suspense novel covers so many things ~ bullying in school, possible improper teacher/student relationships, the effects on a town when the main employer shuts down, blackmail...and the dynamics of it all are woven around the fact that a troubled teenager is missing.

Told from four different POVs, this book will keep you guessing about whom to trust and the domino effect on their lives from each wrong decision made.… (more)