Sons of Blackbird Mountain

If you are looking for a great book to read on a lazy weekend, this is it! I was sucked in and could not put it down. It was absolutely breathtaking!

Well worth the read, and one that will stay with you for a long time!

Cue difficult review....may be some spoilers ahead...

As much as I wanted to enjoy this story, I never could connect with it. Aven was a great character, but I never really got to know her—and moreover I don't think she knew herself. We know who she is in the moment, but we have no clue what her goals in life are or what her ultimate dreams are. It's clear from the story that she doesn't even know from one month to the next what she really is going to/hoping to do, other than her talent for baking. It's evident that she falls for Thor, but she kisses Haakon too...I don't understand her reasoning for kissing one guy while she is considering/drawn to two; it feels very modern and odd, in a time when kissing guys meant strong commitment or even engagement. It's hard to express correctly, but I think the closest I can come is that Aven's character is more reactive in that she is shaped by every circumstance and doesn't have a lot of independent thoughts and goals—that her life is shaped more by undefined longings than by real solid dreams. Her journey from kissing one guy to marrying the other thus felt almost more like her becoming an attachment to someone who had a sense of direction than for her having actually discovered her own sense of direction.

Thor's Deafness was an excellent portrayal, and I really enjoyed reading about his love for the apple orchards and the land he worked.

The drinking issue with Thor is portrayed very heavily and his drunkenness is a key part of the story. This part is all very realistic. However, I felt his recovery was not so realistic. The doctor's attitude I could have excused for rural ignorance, but on top of that they say “oh, it all cooks out” about using the cider for baking (which it doesn't, and which wasn't even a concept back then; teetotalers of the day, according to books I've read from the 1880s, were against all forms of baked goods—breads and puddings and all—that had any sort of drink as an ingredient, because of “desensitizing folks to the flavor.”). Why not use applesauce or apple juice in the baked goods?

Writing style—Bischof uses a choppy, driven prose, and that's hard for me sometimes because instead of using regular sentence fragments, often sentences are deliberately fragmented by putting a period right in the middle for no reason at all. Also, it doesn't pair well with historic forms of expression; they definitely would not have talked in fragments to that extent, and it interrupted the historical feel of the conversation.

Setting—the apple farm itself was excellent. The scenery is rich and easy to see in the imagination. The historical setting, not so much. Seems to drift between Civil War era habits to twenties habits, so without a strong setting of history it felt fragmented. In one part it talks about the brothers' father having fought in the war and makes it seem like they were boys, but I was thinking of it having been set in the 1890s, which would make them men in their fifties...and that was just one of my mental hiccups.

Aven's attack...this wasn't just hard to read. It was also hard to make sense of, and I'm not sure how I'll feel about the next book because of it. While I didn't like that it happened, it also felt like it threw the plot off a bit and took balance out of the ending. After so much focus on the apples and the farm, it felt like this vibrant part of the setting got short-changed in book space because of what happened after it. Several large plot elements got told in a summary sort of way instead of shown in the same sort of richness other parts were described earlier in the story. This gave me a sort of sense that the story unraveled at the end instead of wrapping up much.

So ultimately the book bothered me more than it pleased me, despite some great moments.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free review copy. A favorable review was not required.