Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen

 

Reviewed by Jeanne

Eighteen-year-old Zoey is ready to spread her wings.  After her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, Zoey has felt the odd person out in the family.  Now the summer before she starts college, she decides to move to Mallow Island, SC where her mother owned a condo.  She’s hoping to find some trace of the woman she barely remembers.  Instead, she finds a community of diverse characters, all of whom have something to hide. . . and not all of them are alive.

I have loved all of Sarah Addison Allen’s books.  They have a warmth and a sweetness that lingers long after the last page has been turned.  They also feature characters that I come to know and love and want to spend more time with.  Allen never leaves you hanging but she also tends to leave her characters on the cusp of their greatest happiness, so that the reader has a sense of hope at the end.  However, I had heard that this book was a bit different from her others, darker, and with more characters.  I put off reading it, a bit afraid that I might not like this new direction.

I need not have worried.  While there are a lot of characters, I had no trouble following them along through all the twists and turns.  And there were twists in this one, but not the “gotcha!” thiller twists, but little surprises that, in retrospect, made perfect sense. There’s Mac the chef, who awakens to a sprinkling of cornmeal every morning; Charlotte the henna artist, who is running from her past; Roscoe, the apartment manager, who cares about all the residents; and the elusive Lucy, whom no one has seen in years, but who occasionally peers out the windows of her condo.

This was, for me, vintage Allen.  There were characters I loved and cared about; touches of magic with the (fictional, sadly) dellawisps, the little blue birds who give the apartment complex its name; ghosts who linger and want to tell their own parts of the story; and secrets, mostly of the human heart.  This is also a story of family, not just biological kinship, but a chosen family.

In short, I loved it and am sure it will be on my list of best books of 2024.