It’s official. I’m back to avoiding my Summer Reading Challenge list and doing a darn good job of it. Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest was an excellent read.
I believe this was recommended to me by someone I know at work who recently moved to Florida. She was compiling a stack of books set in Florida and this was one of them. I think that’s how I discovered it. I certainly had never been to the author’s blog, I would have remembered that.
I thought this was a young adult book, for some reason. Probably the cover art, which is interesting but with the blackbird and the headless women, just feels like a kid book, ya know? Well it isn’t, though I am betting there are some teens around here who would enjoy it.
The reviews on the back suggested this was a really creepy read and it would give you goosebumps. Well, I didn’t find it that scarey. (Why do reviewers feel the need to exagerate?
So, the story, let’s see… a line of women, they “have magic on them”, voodoo or sorcery (whichever you prefer), John Gray and the St Augustine priests. A bad guy named Malachi who wasn’t so much bad as misled and a wee bit nuts. Chattanooga, Macon, St Augustine and the swamps of south Florida. Go read it.