Bluebird, Bluebird
Attica Locke, 2017
Little, Brown & Company
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316363297
Summary
When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules—a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well.
Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.
When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders — a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman — have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes — and save himself in the process — before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
From a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Attica Locke's Bluebird, Bluebird is a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Born—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Attica Locke is an American author of several works of fiction and a screenwriter, perhaps best known for the television series Empire. A native of Houston, Texas, she graduated from Northwestern University and now lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Locke’s first novel, Black Water Rising (2009), was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize in the UK (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction). She followed that novel with three other works: The Cutting Season (2012), Pleasantville (2015), and Bluebird, Bluebird (2017).
In addition to her novels, Locke has worked in film and television. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmakers Lab, has written scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, and DreamWorks.
Locke is a member of the academy for the Folio Prize in the UK and is also on the board of directors for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/26/2017.)
Book Reviews
Attica Lock is a highly gifted author whose prose — steeped at times in idiom and lyricism yet sparse and lucid at others — is a joy to read. Laced with flashbacks and bedeviled with twists and turns, the plot propels readers to the end. The good news is that Bluebird, Bluebird is the first in a planned series with Darren Matthews in the lead, and that’s something to look forward to. Highly recommended. READ MORE …
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
Locke writes in a blues-infused idiom that lends a strain of melancholy and a sense of loss to her lyrical style.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
Racial tensions are at the core of this elegant thriller, set in Shelby County, Texas. There is injustice here — institutional racism that has its roots in Texas’s history as a confederate state and continues today.… In slow yet gripping chapters, Locke studies the impact of racism on a small town and its people.
Claire Khoda Hazelton - Guardian (UK)
Locke is a brisk writer with a sharp eye for the subtleties of how rural white Southerners tend to act as if their little towns belong to them — and react harshly to black independence. Still, those truths are not necessarily the evidence one finds in a murder investigation in a small town in Texas. Those places are complicated.
Neely Tucker - Washington Post
An emotionally dense and intricately detailed thriller, roiling with conflicting emotions steeped in this nation's troubled past and present.… A rich sense of place and relentless feeling of dread permeate Attica Locke's heartbreakingly resonant new novel about race and justice in America.… Bluebird, Bluebird is no simple morality tale. Far from it. It rises above "left and right" and "black and white" and follows the threads that inevitably bind us together, even as we rip them apart.
James Endrst - USA Today
Attica Locke's stupendous fourth novel is suffused with the blues. Pushing her classic noir plot deep into history and culture, the Houston native sings her own unshakable, timeless lament. Streaked with wit and hard-earned wisdom, Bluebird, Bluebird soars.
Chicago Tribune
Attica Locke's terrific Bluebird, Bluebird simmers with racial tension.… [A] story told with Locke's crystal-clear vision and pleasurably elemental prose.
Seattle Times
Locke pens a poignant love letter to the lazy red-dirt roads and Piney Woods that serve as a backdrop to a noir thriller as murky as the bayous and bloodlines that thread through the region.… Locke shows off her chops as a superb storyteller.… She is adept at crafting characters who don't easily fit the archetypes of good and evil, but exist in the thick grayness of humanness, the knotty demands of loyalties and the baseness of survival. Locke holds up the mirror of the racial debate in America and shows us how the light bends and fractures what is right, wrong and what simply is the way it is — but perhaps not as it should be.
Jaundrea Clay - Houston Chronicle
Powerful.… Locke is a master of plot who's honed her craft.… The deepest pleasures to be found in Bluebird, Bluebird, though, are in her renderings of those who've loved and lost but still want to believe in the world's benevolence.
Leigh Haber - Oprah Magazine
I've never bought the notion of the Great American Novel. I think when literary historians look back, they'll realize this time had many, but if Attica Locke's Bluebird Bluebird isn't on the list, I'm coming back to haunt them.
Carole E. Barrowman - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
[Locke's] mystery novels are top notch.… [T]he book's hero, a black Texas Ranger, and his fight for justice make this a page-turner that brings Texas into sharp focus.
Bustle
Absorbing.… Darren must deal with his conflicting loyalties to his family and to Texas, as well as his identity as a black man, as he struggles for justice in this tale of racism, hatred, and, surprisingly, love.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A]n atmospheric, convoluted mystery seasoned with racial tension and family loyalty. Verdict: Locke is a gifted author, and her intriguing and compelling crime novel will keep readers engrossed. —Sandra Knowles, South Carolina State Lib., Columbia
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels, deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking point to help start a discussion for Bluebird, Bluebird … then take off on your own:
1. Which character is your favorite and why? Whom do you find most engaging?
2. In Chapter 1, we meet Darren Matthews on the witness stand giving testimony in a court case. What do we learn about him — his family, his past, his marriage, his quirks and personality traits — all in that brief chapter? (It's a skillful piece of writing, by they way.)
3. Was Darren right to have driven out to help his friend Rutherford McMillan? Was he right to have filed a report afterward? In other words, where should Darren's loyalty lie: with the Rangers or with an old family friend? What would you have done?
4. Describe the relationship between Geneva Sweet and Darren? Why does Darren seem to want Geneva's approval, or at least her good will? Why does Geneva withhold her friendship from Darren?
5. How would you describe the racial environment in Lark, Texas?
6. Why does Sheriff Van Horn concentrate on solving the death of Missy Dale while ignoring Michael Wright's?
7. When Randi Winston wonders why her husband came to Texas, saying "this was not his home," Darren disagrees (118). What is it about Texas, especially places like Lark and Shelby County, that gives Darren such a keen sense of home despite the both subtle and far-from-subtle racism? Why does he refuse to leave Texas?
8. As Wendy looks around Geneva's cafe, she observes that "Forty-some-odd years after the death of Jim Crow, not much had changed" (8). Although she is initially thinking of the cafe itself, what else in the county-at-large is unchanged?
9. Follow-up to Question 8: Daren's uncles advise Darren to follow the "ancient rules of southern living" (16). What are those rules, and why are they so important to black men?
10. Darren asks Sheriff Van Horn for a copy of the autopsy report for Michael Wright. But Darren already has access to it through his FBI friend Gregg. Why does he pretend he needs a copy?
11. So…are you straight about who killed whom? Who killed (and why) Michael Wright? Who killed (and why) Missy Dale? And who killed (and why) Joe Sweet, Geneva's husband … and Joe Sweet, Jr., Geneva's son? What about Isaac? How did he come to have a role in all of this?
12. Finally, are you clear on who is related to whom?
13. SPOILER ALERT: What about Darren's mother? What does her discovery of Mac's gun indicate? And what power will the fact that she possesses it give her ... and over whom?
14. What are your predictions for Darren and Lisa's marriage? Do you have sympathy for Lisa's position: that she married a young lawyer who would be a steady partner with her but now his job takes him away from her? Or do you think she should accept Darren's desire to be a Ranger?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)