About mini reviews:
Maybe you’re not an audio book person, or maybe you are. I provide mini reviews of audio books and give a recommendation on the format. Was this book improved by a voice actor? Would a physical copy have been better? Perhaps they complement each other? Read on. . .
Anna Kate has just learned that her Grandma Zee has died and left her the Blackbird Cafe in a small town in Wicklow, Alabama. If she runs the Blackbird for two months, Anna Kate will inherit it and then can do as she wish, which at this point means selling. Back on the northeast coast, Anna Kate is enrolled in medical school for the fall and has a down payment on an apartment.
Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe by Heather Webber has some predictable plot points including reuniting a family divided by a dark history. Basically, Anna Kate’s parents were from Wicklow. They were driving when the car crashed, killing her father and causing memory loss of the event in her mother. Her father was just eighteen. Her father’s family accuse the mother of being angry and irrational, crashing the car on purpose, and thus making her a murderer. So, Anna Kate’s mother left town, never telling anyone she was pregnant.
When Anna Kate arrives as a stranger, the town puts together who she is, who her parents are, and speculate whether Anna Kate will reunite with her father’s side of the family that has maintained her mother is a murderer. Everyone on her mother’s side has passed away. While the father’s family are wealthy Junior League-types, the mother’s family are more witchy. The Blackbird Cafe sells slices of pie that cause the eater to dream of a deceased love one, meaning there’s some magical realism in Webber’s novel, but it’s not prominent to the point of distraction. Essentially, continuing the tradition of baking and selling the pies makes it hard for Anna Kate to sell the cafe and abandon the people who want dreams and the blackbirds that cross over from the land of the dead to deliver messages.
At times, the novel can get a bit sappy. Anna Kate’s father had a young sister, Natalie, who was only three when he died. Natalie has her own sad history, but her talking about anxiety, death, and childhood tends to go into cliche territory, making me think, “yeah, yeah, yeah, movie it along.” I don’t want to listen to people give me philosophical lines about life that could be cross stitched on a pillow.
Then again, there was enough depth to keep me interested. Anna Kate’s paternal grandmother is the one who insists her son was murdered, and Webber cleverly navigates how the grandmother needs to change, and wants change, all while suggesting the woman has only changed her actions and not her mind (for now). Natalie might date a hermit veteran instead of a doctor or lawyer? Grandma will bite her tongue, pause, and then say something nice with great effort. I appreciate when authors demonstrate character growth in fiction, something that often comes in a big reveal at the end but Webber avoids here.
Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is narrated by three people: Stephanie Willis, Bethany Lind, and Nicholas Techosky. Willis and Lind do an excellent job voicing their characters, who narrate separate chapters. The production quality is clear and sharp. Techosky’s part was unnecessary; he narrates chapters in which a reporter questions people associated with the Blackbird Cafe for a news article. Nothing becomes of the article, and the chapters are about sixty seconds, if that. Why did Webber include these? Techosky’s reading is cringey, too — women get the falsetto treatment.
But overall, Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is an interesting, peaceful novel that is fairly predictable but an enjoyable ride nonetheless. It could be enjoyed either as audio or text, given that the author wrote the two female protagonist voices, Anna Kate and Natalie, differently.
Grab the Lapels 
I would never want to live in the south but I do love to visit it and small town southern cafes are one of my favorite things when I go. That alone makes me kind of want to read this book despite it being a little predictable. Perhaps if I see it at my library, I’ll pick it up.
Are you a fan of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes?
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I haven’t seen Fried Green Tomatoes in aaaaaages. I mainly remember the part where you think the one kid is dead by a train, but he lost his arm or leg or something instead.
Southern cafes do have some excellent flavor to them. I remember quite a few from the Appalachia area, so more south east instead of straight south into the heart of Georgia, Alabama, Florida — places like that.
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I’ve been to the Whistle Stop Cafe that’s in the movie. Super cute. I believe the movie is based in Alabama (I actually ruined my DVD watching it so many times), but the cafe is in Georgia.
My uncle opened a florist in Macon, Georgia before I was born. My cousin runs it now but I used to go with my grandparents down there every so often and stay for a week or two.
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Cool! I know there are several of the Flagg novels set around the Whistle Stop. Have you read them?
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I have not. I had actually forgot that they were books. :3
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LOL! You’re a hoot.
P.S. Love Death + Robots is giving me nightmares.
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Oh no! I’m sorry! lmao
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We got to the episode with the astronaut who gets bonked off her ship. She took off her space sleeve, and I was like, “I’m out.” Nick said she ripped her own arm off, so I’m good! 😰
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This plot sounds kind of predictable – as soon as you say she has to live in a small town and then decide whether or not to stay I feel like I know how the story will go. But the addition of magic pies and possible murder makes it sound more unique.
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It was a comforting sort of book, the kind where you assume she’s going to stay and run the cafe, and likely find a handsome outsider who has lived in the town but never fully joined it. But the fact that there is a second woman with a baby adding something to it, and also the narrator never knew her father because he died under suspicious circumstances in an auto accident.
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I like the sounds of that…a bit of excitement, a bit of comfort.
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That’s a pretty cover!
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It definitely makes me hungry.
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I do like a small town / cafe book (I’m also a fan of Fried Green Tomatoes and was taken to the Irondale Cafe in Whistlestop, AL, which I was told was THE cafe; I had a cup of tea, because I am British!), and if the magical realism element doesn’t overtake the rest of it, it sounds like a good one. I like that it has two narrators doing the two narrative voices – The Silver Sparrow has that, as my husband has noted, and it works well.
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The magical realism element is very minimal, and I was surprised. Another reader commented the she also visited the actual Whistle Stop Cafe! I did not realize it was such a destination.
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Hmm I do like the sounds of this one, I’m becoming more accustomed to a little dabble in magical realism now and then. It seems more like a cozy book, know what I mean? Although the cover doesn’t necessarily suggest that, it sort of comes across that way in your description. Also-I love pie!
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It’s got a warm vibe to it, but when I think “cozy” I always think mystery, and those end up being too smooshy for me. The magical realism plays such a small, small role in this novel. If magical realism isn’t your jam, you’ll barely notice it here.
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I tend to link cozy and mystery too…but really I shouldn’t, they can be two different things
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Think of a cozy compared to Agatha Christie compared to a detective novel, etc.
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