Blackbirds is a novel about a girl who can see the future, a very specific part of the future, the death of any person that she touches. Like most people cursed with such gifts, that knowledge does not give her the ability to make any changes to future events. People are bound to die. Miriam Black drifts around the country using her gift to stay alive, finding the imminent death of some of the people she encounters an opportunity to rob the dead, or borrow their homes and cars for her own use. The vision of the violent death of a trucker who picks her up while hitchhiking leads her into the arms of a con man who wants to exploit her and peril at the hands of the meth dealers who want the product that he stole from them. It's all rather standard point A to point B stuff with plenty of violence thrown in for fun. And I guess this novel was written mostly to be fun, an interesting premise carried by lightweight characters that find themselves in violent conflict with each other. Wendig likes his language coarse, but the effect wears thin after a while. Every time he comes up with another way to describe something in particularly nasty way it is both less shocking and less entertaining than the time before. Outside of that, there is just enough hope that somehow Miriam will be able to beat fate and prevent the death of the trucker to keep the reader invested in the plot, but you shouldn’t expect much else from this story or its characters. B-
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