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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2000, 410 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2001, 432 pages
An incandescent memoir 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.
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.
Chapter One
The only house I'll ever call home is the one on Mary Street.
Mary Street is in Carson City, Nevada, and Carson City is flat valley to soft hills. Past the hills are the Sierra Nevada Mountains. When you look up, the sky is deep blue, forever blue, and there are almost never any clouds up there. The clouds that do come gather on top of the Sierras and they look like wadded-up tissue paper. Every now and then, a piece of cloud will tear away and float across the forever-blue sky.
There's one main street right down the middle of the city and it's called Carson Street. The state capital building is on Carson Street and the dome of the capital is painted silver since Nevada is the silver state. Over the silver dome, two flags kick the wind, one blue for Nevada, one red, white, and blue for America.
The Golden Nugget is on Carson Street too, but everyone just calls it the Nugget.
From the Nugget, you go a couple blocks and you can see the house ...
Diana Abu-Jaber Author of Arabian Jazz
Direct, evocative, and emotionally honest, Blackbird will haunt readers with its startling story and its vibrant narration. Frank McCourt Author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis
The unblinking look of one child at a hard world. Written gloriously and movingly. 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. 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 Laura Cunningham Author of A Place in the Country
A tender and delicately rendered tale of a young girl's survival. Marion Winik Author of First Comes Love and Telling
Jennifer Lauck shares a different order of memory, expressed with heartrending immediacy and transparency.
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