A reporter asks Faylene Wiggins, a retired art teacher and known gossip in the town of Wicklow, to begin at the beginning of the story of the blackbirds, so she starts her narrative with the funeral of Zora “Zee” Callow, during which mourners noticed some blackbirds that flew over the service in a cluster.

The narrative moves to focus on Anna Kate, Zora “Zee” Callow’s granddaughter, who awakens in her apartment in Wicklow, Alabama to the sound of people milling around the yard outside her grandmother’s café below. Anna Kate recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Boston and plans to start medical school in August, but her grandmother’s will requires Anna Kate to run the Blackbird Café for two months before she can sell it. Anna Kate hopes to use the proceeds of the sale to pay for medical school.  

Anna Kate and Zee shared a close relationship, even though Anna Kate’s mother, Eden, left Wicklow at 18 and refused to allow Anna Kate to visit. Eden left Wicklow after Anna Kate’s father, Andrew James “AJ” Linden, died in a car accident. Eden was driving the car and AJ’s parents, especially his mother,

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