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   Summary and Book Reviews

Blackbird: Summary and book reviews of Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck, plus links to an excerpt from Blackbird and a biography of Jennifer Lauck.

Blackbird

Blackbird
A Childhood Lost and Found
by Jennifer Lauck
Hardcover: Sep 2000,
410 pages.
Paperback: Sep 2001,
432 pages.

Publication information
Read an Excerpt
Reader Reviews

Author Biography
Critics' Opinion:   very good
Readers' Rating:  Four Stars
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BOOK SUMMARY

With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost. Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.

The house on Mary Street was home to Jennifer; her older brother B.J.; their hardworking father, who smelled like aftershave and read her Snow White; and their mother, who called her little daughter Sunshine and embraced Jackie Kennedy's sense of style. Through a child's eyes, the skies of Carson City were forever blue, and life was perfect -- a world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with hairspray, powder, and a kiss on the cheek....But soon, everything Jennifer has come to love and rely on begins to crumble, sending her on a roller coaster of loss and loneliness. In a world unhinged by tragedy, where beautiful mothers die and families are warped by more than they can bear, a young girl must transcend a landscape of pain and mistreatment to discover her richest resource: her own unshakable will to survive.

BOOK REVIEWS

Media Reviews

Very Good  Kirkus Reviews
A searing, soaring memoir of one girl's complicated and almost unbelievable childhood.

Very Good  Publisher's Weekly
It's impossible not to be moved by the young girl's plight; it's equally impossible not to admire the adult's strength and courage in surviving it.

Author Blurb  Frank McCourt Author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis
The unblinking look of one child at a hard world. Written gloriously and movingly.

Author Blurb  Marion Winik Author of First Comes Love and Telling
Jennifer Lauck shares a different order of memory, expressed with heartrending immediacy and transparency.

Author Blurb  Laura Cunningham Author of A Place in the Country
A tender and delicately rendered tale of a young girl's survival.

Author Blurb  Diana Abu-Jaber Author of Arabian Jazz
Direct, evocative, and emotionally honest, Blackbird will haunt readers with its startling story and its vibrant narration.

Author Blurb  Gregg Kleiner Author of Where River Turns to Sky
Blackbird is Lauck's stunning testament to the inborn ability children have to survive. By the book's bittersweet final pages, you're on your feet cheering for her.

Author Blurb  Hope Edelman Author of Motherless Daughters
This is one of those rare books that captures both the innocence of the child narrator and the wisdom of the adult author....Blackbird is both a tribute to the author's mother and to her own powers of survival. I was so caught up in Jennifer's story I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, yet I didn't want this book to end

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated 2 of 5 of 5 by Jeanette
Disappointing
At first I found the book interesting but then it became somewhat boring. It seems that she was always attacking others which I found to be rather one sided. She writes it to portray a child's view but it is definitely an adults view of past...   Read More

Rated 2 of 5 of 5 by Mozart
Surprise
I was surprised by the book. It had been recommended to me by a friend. The writing style is completely unappealing and horrible slow. The child like writing is annoying, eg. 'This review is black text and short words.' and only gets in the way of...   Read More

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