📘 [Review] Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen
A couple weeks ago I finished Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen. I flew through this book. I bought it as an impulse buy at Target a handful of years ago and honestly wasn't really sure what it was about, but as usual, I was swayed by the birds on the cover. 🐦 It's a weakness of mine.
Quick Review
| Category | Notes/Rating |
|---|---|
| Characters | This is a character-driven story. I found all the main characters were lovable in their own way, even the more... stubborn ones. |
| Writing Style | I loved the author's voice and felt structures were handled well. |
| Editing | No complaints. |
| Story | Very good. This is a character-driven story. |
| Overall | ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 Loved this! |
Loved this one! I almost gave it 5 stars but there was a part towards the end that I thought felt a little... forced? Contrived? Overall though, this is a bittersweet story about life and death, and moving on.
Synopsis
The story opens with Zoey, a girl moving to Mallow Island, to attend college. Mallow Island is a tourist spot made famous by the book Sweet Mallow, written by one of the residents there. Zoey is moving into her mother's old apartment in a hidden little condo called the Dellawisp, named after the mischivous turquoise birds1 who nest in the trees on the property. Her mother died when she was young, and so she's looking forward to exploring her new apartment and maybe learning more about who her mother was.
Then, the night Zoey moves in, one of the longtime tenents dies.
Other Birds is a character-focused narrative that spends time with all the tenents of the Dellawisp, exploring their pasts and what they hold onto. And in many cases, who they hold onto - as the small condo's resident list also includes spirits.
Story
As I said, this story is bittersweet. At times it's sad, at times it's very sweet like the marshmellow candies the island is themed around. I found the story charming the whole way through. Like I said, I wasn't really sure what I was getting into when I picked this up; I really appreciate this as an attempt to branch out from my usual wheelhouse (high fantasy) a bit and being pleasantly surprised. 🙂
It's easy to fall in love with the main characters. Even the ones who are causing problems, you can start seeing where they're coming from - even if you still think they're in the wrong by the end. You're rooting for them, and even when they're flawed, they're still believable people for the most part. Some of them are pieced together in front of you as you go along and the pacing of the revelations is wonderful.
Chapter Structure
I mentioned the character-chapter structure in my review for Godkiller and how it's not my favorite. In Godkiller, every chapter is named after a character. This is not done for any particular reason, except to alert you that you'll be getting that character's private thoughts occasionally. But the chapter itself is still third person. To me, it's completely unnecessary. This would be just a small nitpick, except that it literally leads to a point where one chapter is a single page. I really dislike it and it almost feels like the author doesn't trust you to remember who the characters are, or to understand why you're only getting one character's perspective.
In Other Birds, your typical chapter is not named after any particular character. Instead, this is only done for the ghosts' chapters. This makes sense, as the ghosts' chapters are all first-person, whereas a regular chapter is not. The regular chapters are in third person and have the freedom to move between perspectives, like a regular novel, trusting that the reader can understand who is leading the current scene without being explicitly told.
Ghost chapters are told from one perspective, first person, and even use a different font. They're infrequent and give good depth to the story.
Final Thoughts
This was such a lovely book. Instant love with it. I'm going to check out more works by this author and hope that I'll enjoy them as much as I did this one. 😄
I had to look up if these were real, as I love birds and the color turquoise. With the story being about ghosts and the birds having "wisp" in their name, I was curious if the birds had some sort of cultural connection to spirits. I could only find one website that seemed to purport that it was a myth with ties to many real-world cultures, but honestly I didn't finish reading that article because it was heavily spun for SEO, which makes me believe it's bullshit. The only other references I could find to dellawisps were on pages talking about this book. So, maybe it's a mythological bird the author heard of somewhere, but I couldn't track it down.↩