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Having finished the book, here are some selected favorite quotes from Sarah Addison Allen’s Other Birds:

• Zoey had spent too much of her life as an outsider to ever think of running to anyone when she was afraid. It wasn’t that she was particularly brave, she just didn’t want the disappointment of being turned away.
• It had taken him all his life to understand this, but even unlikable things have worth. It was how, after all, he’d learned to live with himself.
• She was still trying to process the fact that what she knew might be all she would ever know, and there would be no guidance on where she came from or where she should go from here.
• She was young enough to think that drama was something you had to run toward. She had no idea that drama doesn’t need to be chased. It knows exactly where you live.
• Oliver now found himself in the untenable position of not knowing how to maintain her interest, because he didn’t know where it was coming from.
• She was feeling emotionally spent, and when that happened the real her, the one who craved permanence and connections and simply being still, started peeking through the cracks.
• …a local accent that always sounded to Charlotte like they were getting to the good part of a story.
• It was an odd feeling, when she really thought about it, not having anyone in the world who knew everything about you and loved you anyway.
• Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.
• So Zoey understood that mothering was in the details you never saw. And the lack of it was the things you always noticed.
• She had been the source of all that was good in his life. Had she known that? Was part of his holding on proving to her how much he loved her, because he hadn’t said it enough?
• “Does it ever feel to you like the best things go away too fast, and the worst things never, ever leave you alone?”
• Oliver knew she had a long road ahead of her, learning to accept that the one person you wanted to love you the most was the one person who never would.
• …it hadn’t actually been dread he’d been feeling—dread at facing all those boxes, or the walls that were literally closing in on him, or another argument with his mother, which he would sometimes pick on purpose to try to get her to say something other than “You think I had a choice?” when he demanded to know why she’d had him in the first place. No, it hadn’t been dread at all. It had been hope. Hope that, somehow, things would be different. Every single day that hope had buoyed him, and then sunk him.
• “Is today your birthday?” That made him smile, the same smile from his early school photos. She found herself thinking, There you are.
• 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.
• She was used to bottling everything up until she fell with a white-hot intensity that felt like the hunger of her childhood, when she would quickly fill herself out of fear of not getting enough.
• I spend my childhood believing the birds were actually these people, simply transformed. I remember the musty, sweet scent of them. I remember the bloom of dust on their wings.

I have to admit that in the act of compiling the quotes, my appreciation for the book has deepened. On the surface, it seemed like and easy, breezy read, and there’s nothing challenging whatsoever about the prose, but it’s peppered (pun intended) with little piquant points of profundity and beauty, like the ones above. Some characters are more successful than others, and Charlotte in particular seems to be the more completely realized one, maybe because she’s the one in whom the author saw herself the most. The ending, with the sudden arrival of Charlotte’s mother, felt like a bit of a “reverse” deus ex machina, and the climax is resolved with an action sequence that Allen doesn’t really have the chops to pull off, but otherwise, the mystery is engrossing, and the reveals felt well paced and organic. One nitpick would be the sprawl of characters and perspectives; there are sudden shifts in internal monologue that require rapid recall and reorientation to the mindset of the present character. The book feels like a piece of theater, and I think a tighter, somewhat deeper cast would have served the story better. Still—those are minor complaints; overall, I really enjoyed it, and some of the author’s descriptions of alienation, rejection and being hounded by a past you’re desperate to leave behind hit close to home in some ways, and will stick with me.