Alexis:
Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe follows two main characters: Anna Kate and Natalie. When Anna Kate’s grandmother passes away, she returns to her family’s hometown, a small Alabama town called Wicklow, to take over Granny Zee’s cafe. She’s only planning on staying for the summer, but she has some long-time family drama to unravel.
Meanwhile, Natalie returns to Wicklow with her young daughter after her husband dies in a tragic accident. While she’s working on gaining her independence, she has to live with her parents, and try to reconcile with her mother, who never got over Natalie’s brother’s death.
I enjoyed this one! It was the perfect beach read. Webber’s writing flows well, and I found myself impressed by how well she handles such a large cast of characters. Wicklow is charming, and the people fun and quirky (think Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls). I especially enjoyed reading from Anna Kate’s POV as she bakes pies and learns about her family. The themes of grief, losing a family member, and reconnecting with family are resonant throughout the book.
Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe is considered magical realism, but unlike some other magical realism books I’ve read, I would consider this one lightly magical realism; the cafe and pies are the only real elements.
While I think Webber’s dialogue is overall written very well, there were definitely some melodramatic speeches that weren’t very realistic. I also wanted to get to know the two love interests better; I feel like their characters sputtered out too much by the end. And there was a weird tie in with a cat at the end that was strange and not entirely explained. Lastly, there was also a reference that Natalie was a part of the Daughters of the Confederacy (yikes!)
Other than that, I think if you’re looking for an easy, heartwarming book set in a charming Southern town with lots of descriptions of pie, then I’ll think you’ll enjoy this one.
VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐💫/5
takes two to book review 
I’m noticing a lot of people didn’t understand the significance of the cat at the ending. This comment does contain spoilers FYI. The author draws a significant amount of attention to the scars that Anna Kate often notices on both the cook Bow and the gray cat who always seems to be steering her in the right direction. It’s easy to miss, but she also mentions more than once the brown bird with the crooked wing and the markings that look like penciled-on eyebrows, then later a brown feather in Jena’s hair. All of these details are supposed to clue you in that the cat and the brown bird are Bow and Jena. When Kate finally gets the truth of her parents’ accident from Aubin at the end, he reveals that the reason Eden crashed that day is because she swerved to avoid a cat that was chasing a bird across the road, but he also mentions she couldn’t completely avoid clipping them. These are the reasons for Bow’s scars and Jena‘s elbow injury/crooked wing that she also mentions at the café. It’s also the “wrong“ that they are trying to right, which they mention is the reason for them staying in Wicklow for two decades when they were originally only passing through. The entire book, all of the strange and mysterious things that the gray cat is seen doing are just his and Jena’s meddling ways, trying to get Anna Kate to see the light. Hope this helps!
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