Reviews with content warning for Addiction - Outros pássaros

Reviews tagging 'Addiction'

Outros pássaros by Sarah Addison Allen

56 reviews

heather_reads's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A really good found family, coming of age story. Some of the turns taken were predictable, but much like a comfort movie even knowing some turns did not diminish the pleasure I took in reading it. Other turns I did not see coming and had a few OH! moments. Beautiful scenery, lots of description. Overall a very lovely read.

Content Warnings

emtees's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This was a sweet, light but really enjoyable book. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I loved it.

The story follows Zoey, a young woman who moves into an apartment she inherited from her late mother on Mallow Island off the coast of South Carolina. The Dellawisps, as the building is called, is small and home to a quirky assortment of neighbors. Zoey, a lonely and somewhat quirky girl herself (she is accompanied at all times by an invisible bird), dreams that living in her mother’s old home will allow her to finally know the mother she lost as a child. There are hints of some mysteries in the mother’s background, and so I assumed the book would focus on those mysteries and on the relationship between Zoey and her mother, but those ended up being less central to the book than I thought. Instead, this is really a book about how finding happiness in the present is more important than digging up the secrets of the past.

Shortly after Zoey moves in, one of her neighbors dies, and Zoey takes on the job of cleaning out the woman’s apartment on behalf of her son. Lizbeth, the dead woman, has her own secrets, and part of the book is about unearthing the story she always wanted to have told. She isn’t the only one with a hidden story; all the residents of the Dellawisps, living and dead, have things in their pasts that they alternate between pushing away and desperately needing to face. But that, too, isn’t really the point. While all the mysteries are answered in the end - and Sarah Addison Allen is very good at mysteries, seeding them into the story in such a way that you only realize where the plot is going just before it arrives there, and yet you can’t claim the answer wasn’t in front of you the entire time - by the time they are addressed, they don’t feel like the most important thing. Instead, the book is really about the relationships that form between Zoey and her neighbors. It may seem a little silly, “the real point was the friends we made along the way,” but this book sells that idea beautifully and sincerely. It’s one of the nicest takes on the found family trope I’ve read recently. The Dellawisps just feels like a place you want to live, and as short a timespan as the story takes place in, I ended it fully convinced that the bonds that had formed during the story would last.

Other Birds is magical realism, which is a genre I sometimes have trouble with; as a hardcore fantasy fan, I don’t always enjoy how light a touch this genre has with its fantastical elements. But the magic is beautifully woven into this story. Zoey and several of her neighbors are haunted, not just by their pasts, but by the supernatural, but even these hauntings have a gentle, almost homey feel to them. This is, technically, a ghost story, but there is nothing frightening or dangerous about it.

Content Warnings