If you love small town stories, or stories with a food focus, Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is a warm, (bitter)sweet combination of the two. Anna Kate has reluctantly come to Wicklow, Alabama to run her grandmother's cafe for two months as a condition of her will, and she has no interest in staying beyond that. Her mother fled the town while pregnant with Anna Kate, and now she's there alone to confront the people and past that her mother left.
There's a lot of sadness in this story as many of the characters are dealing with loss (and finding hope in the dreams brought by the cafe's legendary blackbird pie Anna Kate's learning to make), but there's also the sweetness of new friends, family, and home being created. It's the kind of story that left me with a little sadness at the end, because I wanted to stay with the characters and keep following their lives.
There's a lot of sadness in this story as many of the characters are dealing with loss (and finding hope in the dreams brought by the cafe's legendary blackbird pie Anna Kate's learning to make), but there's also the sweetness of new friends, family, and home being created. It's the kind of story that left me with a little sadness at the end, because I wanted to stay with the characters and keep following their lives.