Title/Author: Blackbird by Anna Carey
Publication Date/Publisher: September 16, 2014/Harper Teen
Series: Yes, Blackbird Duology #1
Source and Format: I received this book for free from the publisher via Edelweiss. This in no way affected my opinion of the book, or the content of my review.
Rating: 2 stars
From Goodreads:
A girl wakes up on the train tracks, a subway car barreling down on her. With only minutes to react, she hunches down and the train speeds over her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she is, or how she got there. She has a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist of a blackbird inside a box, letters and numbers printed just below: FNV02198. There is only one thing she knows for sure: people are trying to kill her.
On the run for her life, she tries to untangle who she is and what happened to the girl she used to be. Nothing and no one are what they appear to be. But the truth is more disturbing than she ever imagined.
What a disappointing run of books I’ve been reading. Blackbird is technically interesting, but I’m surprised the second person narration didn’t make me DNF. Each time I picked the book up it took a little while to get re-acclimated to it though, so I recommend reading it all in one sitting, if possible. Actually, I recommend watching The Pest instead of reading Blackbird.
The second person narration puts YOU as the main character of the story. This should make things feel more immediate and thrilling, but it didn’t really work that way for me. Even when people are being murdered right in front of YOU, there is no emotional connection to them, because YOU have no memories.And because YOU don’t seem to actually feel any emotions.
YOU keep making terrible decisions. Like, I would totally completely trust the first hot guy I saw, and go live with him even though I plan to steal from him again and again. There are some fade-to-black(bird) sexy times and every teen character in this book is super unsupervised (minus the tracking/surveillance), so this makes me think that these characters should have been written as older than 17/18. Not because of the implied sex parts, but because if you’re going to make your characters operate as grown-ups, then what is the point of being a teenager? All the teenage obstacles are irrelevant in Blackbird due to lack of parental/authority figures – even the cops are failures – so they are basically all 25 years old.
YOU are obviously on the run and have no memories of family, Ben (drug dealing heartthrob/savior) has an dead father and an institutionalized mother, Izzie (Ben’s neighbor’s granddaughter who YOU befriend and also try to steal from again and again) keeps turning up and YOU keep putting her in danger. Why do these people keep helping YOU?!
Blackbird is being pushed as The Maze Runner meets Code Name Verity, and I’m sorry, but WHAT?! I guess it’s like The Maze Runner because there is running and I didn’t like it? But Code Name Verity is a literary masterpiece and I’m extremely offended by this comparison. Is it because…the main character is a girl? I still say to just watch The Pest instead. Proof (I know this is not from The Pest because it’s from my second favorite movie ever okay):
Paperback Heart 
This was on my TBR list, but it looks like I’m going to be skipping it. YOU amused me with your review though. I’ve nominated you for the Sisterhood of the World Bloggers Award. You are under no obligation to accept, but if you are interested you can find out more here. I just wanted to let you know how much I love your blog 🙂