Mothers and Daughters

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This is a novel about mother-daughter relationships set in a small southern town shot full of magical realism. The blackbirds in the book are the ancestors of Anna Kate Callow, whose family of Celtic women are healers. Every night at midnight, her ancestors come through the tunnel between the land of the dead and the living world as blackbirds and perch in the mulberry trees in the backyard of her grandmother Zee's Alabama home. If a person has eaten a piece of blackbird pie (actually fruit pie) made by someone in Anna Kate's family that day, the songs the blackbirds sing between midnight and one a.m. will show up as a message from a dead loved one in that persons dreams. As the book opens, Zee has died unexpectedly and Anna Kate has arrived in Wicklow, Alabama for the first time to settle her grandmother's estate. Under the terms of the will, she must stay and run her grandmother's Blackbird Café for two months before she can sell it. During that two months, both she and another young woman her age will struggle with the expectations of their forceful mothers and come to grips with how to balance the promises they have made to their familes and their own desires for their lives. Recommended.