Please don’t let my rating deter you from reading this book! It didn’t fully work for me, but I still think the book was enjoyable and I’m interested in reading this author’s future work!

“The Silver Birds” starts off quickly. I really enjoyed the fast pace of the beginning. However, the book kind of lost me at some point, and I can’t fully explain why. 😕 One factor that didn’t really help me stay invested was the fact that River’s brother’s disappearance (that’s mentioned in the synopsis) only happens at 30-something %, meaning it took over a third the book to establish what we already knew was going to happen.

This would’ve been fine if the book had managed to keep my interest throughout the rest of the story, but unfortunately I got a little bored, and I genuinely can’t explain why. I think the story is so interesting!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t know why I didn’t love it more! 😭💔 Unfortunately, I was also not super engrossed in the romance (I literally didn’t care at all about it), so that also wasn’t enough to keep my interest… ☹

With that said, I think this book did a lot of things right: I liked the characters, the setting was very atmospheric, the magic was quite unique (

hearts being vessels for souls, people burying hearts so their loved ones’ souls would grow as plants as a way to keep those loved ones “alive”, witches taking advantage of this and taking control of the plants in the forest to attack humans, witches transforming into the deadly silver birds but being under the control of an ancient witch, Rosen growing plants in her wounds because she’s basically part of nature……. It was all so unique!

), the story itself was quite interesting (even though the way it was told didn’t fully work for me), and I really enjoyed the themes of forgiveness.

Other things:
➼ This book is categorized as “adult” and “dark”, but I don’t think it is anything too crazy, and I feel like it’s quite accessible to most people who read YA.
➼ I did find some typos (more than I usually do, even in self-published books), and some of them made me think the author’s first language isn’t English. Come to find out that, yes, she is actually French, which made sense. I don’t think the grammar mistakes made this book unreadable by any means, though! And I don’t really mind looking past that when a book is self-published. 🙂
➼ Rosen’s hair is described as “blonde” or “strawberry”, but in the cover she’s a full-on redhead. How dare! 😤 (/lh) 
➼ I really appreciate the TWs at the start!