A review of Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen
Some books tell stories about people. Others quietly tell us something about ourselves. Other Birds belongs to the second kind.
Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen is a tender story about grief, loneliness, family secrets, belonging, and the strange ways people learn to live after losing someone they love. Set around the mysterious apartment building of Mallow Island, the novel brings together people who are carrying different kinds of loss. Some have lost people. Some have lost their past. Some have lost the version of themselves they thought they were supposed to be.
At its heart, however, this is not simply a story about death. It is a story about what happens to the people who remain. It asks a difficult but beautiful question:
How do you continue living when a part of your old life has already disappeared?
🕊️ Letting Go Is Not the Same as Forgetting
One of the most moving ideas in the novel is that holding on to the past does not necessarily mean that we are honouring it. Sometimes, we hold on because we are afraid that moving forward means betraying the people, relationships, or versions of ourselves we have lost.
But Other Birds gently challenges that idea. Love does not disappear simply because we continue living. Memories do not become less meaningful because we create new ones.
“Children, don’t hold on to old love so hard you forget to live. Old love isn’t the only love you’ll ever have.”
— Other Birds
Perhaps that is one of the most comforting messages of the book: letting go does not erase what happened. It simply allows us to make room for what is still possible.
🌿 The People Who Don't Quite Fit
The title itself becomes a beautiful metaphor. There are the birds that seem to belong naturally to the world around them, and then there are the other birds.
“There are birds, and then there are other birds.”
The characters in the novel are, in their own ways, other birds. They don't always fit neatly into the lives expected of them. They are lonely, complicated, wounded, unusual, and sometimes misunderstood.
And perhaps that is why they find one another. People who feel like outsiders often recognise loneliness in others without needing it to be explained.
“If the people around you don’t love you just as you are, find new people. They’re out there.”
This line captures something important about belonging: sometimes the problem is not that we are too difficult to love, but that we are surrounded by people who are unable to love us in the way we need.
🫧 Grief Can Become a Second Life
The novel understands grief in a particularly quiet way. Grief is not presented as something that simply ends after a certain amount of time. Instead, it changes shape.
Sometimes it becomes a memory. Sometimes it becomes loneliness. Sometimes it becomes guilt. Sometimes it becomes the fear of loving again. And sometimes it becomes a reason to stop living fully.
“Once you accumulate enough regrets in life, they cease to hurt you.”
That thought stayed with me because regret can be strangely persistent. We replay what we should have said, what we should have done, and the versions of our lives that might have existed if we had chosen differently.
But eventually, perhaps we learn that a life cannot be lived backward. The past can explain us, but it cannot continue living for us.
🏡 Mothering, Family and the Things We Notice
One of the lines that particularly struck me was the idea that mothering exists in details we often don't notice until they are missing.
“Mothering was in the details you never saw. And the lack of it was the things you always noticed.”
There is something painfully true about this. Love is often made visible through ordinary things: a meal prepared without asking, someone remembering what you like, a light left on, a question about whether you arrived safely.
We often recognise these things only when they stop happening. In that sense, the absence of love can sometimes be louder than its presence.
🍲 Food, Love and Storytelling
Another beautiful idea in the novel is the connection between food and emotional healing. Food is not merely something that fills an empty stomach. It can carry memories, culture, affection and stories.
“When I was younger, food was all about trying to fill an emotional void. But she taught me food was really about storytelling.”
I loved this distinction. There is a difference between using something to fill an emptiness and using it to create something meaningful. Food becomes an act of giving, connecting, remembering and creating.
🪞 Becoming Someone New
One of the most interesting ideas in the novel is the possibility that becoming someone else can sometimes bring us closer to who we really are.
“How odd that pretending to be someone else has made me happier than I was when I was just being myself.”
There is an irony here. Sometimes we spend years protecting an identity simply because it is familiar. We become attached to the person we used to be, even when that person no longer fits the life we want.
The novel suggests that transformation can feel almost like a second birth. Not because the past becomes meaningless, but because we finally give ourselves permission to become someone new.
🔐 The Weight of Family Secrets
The novel also explores how secrets can reshape a person's understanding of their own life. A truth revealed too late can make someone question everything they once believed about their family and themselves.
“There were only two times in a person’s life when a family secret should be revealed—at the very beginning, or at the very end.”
Secrets are rarely isolated pieces of information. They become part of the stories families tell about themselves. When those stories change, people's understanding of their own identity can change with them.
🌅 Death Is Not the End of the Story
What makes Other Birds particularly poignant is the way it approaches death. The novel does not pretend that losing someone is easy. Instead, it asks us to consider what remains after someone is gone.
“So it’s time for me to go now. I’m happy about it, so don’t you be sad. Because going doesn’t mean all gone. We’ll meet again one day.”
Perhaps this is where the novel's idea of letting go becomes most powerful. The people we lose do not continue beside us in the same physical way, but their influence can remain woven into our lives.
We carry their habits, their words, their stories, their recipes, their laughter and sometimes even the things they taught us without realising they were teaching us.
🌱 What I Took From the Story
For me, Other Birds is ultimately a story about letting go without becoming empty.
It is about accepting that some chapters of our lives are over, even when we are not ready for them to be. It is about understanding that remembering someone does not require us to remain stuck where we lost them.
Sometimes, moving forward is not a betrayal of the past. Sometimes it is the way we honour it.
The characters in the novel remind us that loneliness does not always mean there is nobody around us. Sometimes it means we have not yet found the people with whom we can truly be ourselves.
And perhaps that is why the idea of the other birds stays with me. We do not all sing the same way. We do not all fly in the same direction. Some of us take longer to find our flock.
But being different does not mean being destined to be alone.
“I go now to settle in a place where there is always happiness.”
And perhaps the real lesson is not to wait for that place.
Perhaps we have to learn how to create a little happiness
wherever we are.
