Blackbird Blues
With the help of sixty-year-old black jazz man Lucius, Mary Kaye O'Donnell, an eighteen-year-old Irish-American woman and aspiring jazz singer in Chicago, finds her way toward dealing with an unwanted pregnancy and the death of Sister Michaeline, her voice coach, jazz mentor, and only guide through the bedlam of her childhood.
Mary Kaye's neighbor, Judge Engelmann, introduced her to the work of James Baldwin and the nuns exposed her to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but Lucius is the first black person Mary Kaye comes to really know. They bond over Sister Michaeline's untimely death. Over time, Lucius helps Mary Kaye launch her career as a singer in his jazz band. He also gives her Sister Michaeline's diary from her early cloistered years, saying it was the nun's wish. In reading the diary and in conversations with Lucius and Judge Engelmann, Mary Kaye discovers disillusioning aspects and secrets of her beloved mentor.
This is Mary Kaye's coming-of-age story as she weighs her options based on the diary, her faith, and her music, set against the background of illegal abortion and child abandonment in the 1963 Chicago world of civil rights and interracial jazz. It is entirely a work of fiction, but in today's political climate one could imagine something similar becoming real.
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"The story's surprising twists and turns build steadily to its deeply-affecting climax--like a masterful jazz performance itself. As Blackbird Blues is true to the sounds of jazz, it is true to the sacrifices of love, family, and community made by individuals who find one another in the jazz world." -- Paul Berliner, Author of Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation
"Blackbird Blues gives us a portrait of a time and place that makes us examine our own era. Carney writes with elegance and authority, whether she takes us inside a convent, a Chicago jazz club, an illegal abortion clinic, or a young woman's heart. Like The Bell Jar, but more communal and publicly aware." -- S.L. Wisenberg
"Jean Carney has written a masterful novel. She has the rare capacity to combine almost surgically precise prose with warm and compassionate understanding of human misery and spunk. Blackbird Blues made me see, taste, smell, and touch the world in which Mary Kaye, Maureen, and Lucius lived, with all their fears, desires, regrets, and contradictions, as if they were my own. Reading Blackbird Blues is a powerful experience. It left me with a greater sense of hope and a more sympathetic attention to despair. It will stay with me for a long time." -- Stefania Tutino, Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles and author of Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism
"Blackbird Blues' graceful plot and spare style evoke the existential complexities of these haunting characters and the times in which they lived with poignancy and power." -- Zachary S. Schiffman, author of The Birth of the Past
