Priest, Cherie. Four and Twenty Blackbirds.PRIEST, Cherie. Four and twenty blackbirds. birds. Tot. 285p. c2003. 0-765-31308-1. $13.95. SA Blackbirds is a modern version of the Southern Gothic Southern Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. novel, with at least four and twenty standard horror elements: ghosts, scary mansions, knife-wielding heroine, maniacal ma·ni·a·cal or ma·ni·ac adj. Suggestive of or afflicted with insanity. cousins, inbreeding inbreeding, mating of closely related organisms. Inbreeding is chiefly used as a means of insuring the preservation of specific desired traits among the offspring of purebred animals (see breeding). , crazy old women, insane asylums and so on. Traveling from hilltops in Tennessee to swamps in Florida, Eden Moore, the young heroine, hits the highpoints of the horror genre as she goes. Eden is the daughter of a woman put in an insane asylum to hide the fact that she is pregnant. She is raised by her aunt and her aunt's husband and by three ghosts who talk to her throughout her childhood. As she becomes a woman, she sets out to uncover her past for herself. The plot is a little intense for the prepubescent prepubescent /pre·pu·bes·cent/ (pre?pu-bes´ent) prepubertal. pre·pu·bes·cent adj. Of or characteristic of prepuberty. n. A prepubescent child. reader, but great for the high school student familiar with Poe and Hawthorne. The echoes of the classics, blended with the modern edgy heroine who has no maiden-in-distress characteristics, make an interesting contrast for the reader who knows the classics of American literature American literature, literature in English produced in what is now the United States of America. Colonial Literature American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in . The ending is a little too neat and therapeutically modern, especially after all the drama of the previous events, but it's a good story nonetheless. Nola Theiss, Sanibel, FL |
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