Review – The Warbler by Sarah Beth Durst (4/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Magical Realism
Length: 315 pages
Publisher:‎ Lake Union Publishing
Release Date: March 1, 2025
ASIN: B0D45Z142Z
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed ebook from Kindle Unlimited
Rating: 4/5 stars

“Ten months. That’s the longest Elisa has stayed anyplace, constantly propelled by her fear that if she puts down roots, a family curse will turn her into a tree.

But she’s grown tired of flitting from town to town and in and out of relationships. When she discovers a small town in Massachusetts where mysterious forces make it impossible for the residents to leave, she hopes she can change her fate.

As Elisa learns about the town’s history, she understands more about the women in her family, who seem doomed to never get what they want. Now she believes she’s stuck, too—is that a patch of bark on her arm? But her neighbor’s collection of pet birds sings secrets that Elisa can almost understand—secrets she must unravel in order to be truly alive.”

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on ebook from Kindle Unlimited

Thoughts: I liked this, but it wasn’t Durst’s best book by a long shot. Durst is a go-to author for me; I am a huge fan and have read nearly all of her books. Some of my favorites are: “Race the Sands”, “The Spellshop”, The Queens of Renthia series, and “Spark”. I tend to enjoy her adult fantasy more than her middle grade books. This book is definitely adult, but falls more into the magical realism or maybe paranormal genre than the fantasy genre.

This is a bit of an odd story about a woman, Elisa, who will turn in to a tree if she stays too long somewhere she considers home. This is a curse that has been passed down from her mother. Elisa has made it her life’s work to track down the source of this curse, and that leads her to the strange small town in Massachusetts where people have trouble leaving. She ends up digging into her past and uncovering a lot of both her grandmother’s and mother’s secrets. We follow the POV of Elisa, her mother, and her grandmother.

There is a strong focus on mother-daughter relationships here and on living a transient life style. This leads to some discussion of survival in the modern world and what it means to not have ties to anyone (but your mother in a lot of cases).

I enjoyed the idea of the curses and the quirky characters that we met in the small town that Elisa ended up in. It was engaging to unravel the mystery of this town and watch Elisa try to get her choices back. I was a bit confused about the idea of a “place being home” the thing triggered the curse, especially when we got into more abstract definitions of home. If that was true, wouldn’t being on the road all the time make the ongoing journey turn into home itself? Or is this more of a mental state? It was a bit confusing.

I struggled with the slow burn pace of this. I also thought that some of the more magical things that happened at the end of the story felt out of place and a bit abrupt. I enjoyed these magical inclusions, but I wish we had built toward them a bit earlier in the story and that they had been better explained. I also thought the switching POV made the story feel a bit fractured and drew things out; this may have been more effective if we had watched Elisa uncover all these secrets herself…I don’t know. I understand why this was written from those three POVs but I never engaged well with Elisa’s mother or grandmother, I didn’t really understand why they made the decisions they did.

My Summary (4/5): Overall I liked this but didn’t love it. This is a bit of an odd story that is very slow burn but has some subtle magical elements thrown in towards the end. I wish the build had been a bit faster. I was also mixed on the multiple POV format used here, I understand why it was done that way but didn’t really enjoy the other POVs aside from Elisa’s. It is an interesting and quirky little story. It didn’t convey the same level of magical wonder that a lot of other Durst’s books do, and definitely wasn’t her strongest book. However, it was an intriguing little read.