Synopsis: The stories we read have the power to change our lives.
Sadie Smith lives an ordinary life, unlike the extraordinary ones of the characters in the books where she finds an escape. She dives into her stories with wanton abandon.
Until one story changes it all.
The story of the impetuous Killian Quinn: an agent for the Zeta Defense Agency, determined to avenge his fallen partner. As she follows him further down the rabbit hole, worlds collide when she awakens with her hands tied to a chair in the face of armed men. Sadie finds herself dropped in the middle of a battle between secret agencies she didn’t even know existed, but maybe where she’s belonged all along.
Publication date: 17th November 2020
Publisher: Independent Book Publishers Association
"If you never expect anything, you'll never be disappointed."
And right then I knew I'd found my bookish alter ego for the fist time. Sadie is all I am and all I want to be. She's a History major –like me–, she works at the Smithsonian (yes, the Smithsonian!!) in the Exhibitions and Collections Management Department, and sometimes as a tour guide. What a dream came true for someone like her –and someone like me, honestly. Also, she's a bibliophile –again, like me–, her love life is a mess –like mine, *shrug*– and she's clearly an introvert, she has only one –maybe two?– friends. And she's smart and intuitive, which is related to the story in some way.
So the story goes around Sadie, who casually finds an e-reader in a pub and start reading one of the stories in it, and after some events she finds herself in the story she was reading. That takes her to a parallel world filled with intrigues, speculations, spies, technology and secret agencies she'd never thought could exist. And once she's fallen into that story, it will be impossible to her to forget about it and return to her normal life.
"If the universe can continue to spin amid the like of black holes and exploding stars, I can keep on breathing and moving forward."
Elle M. Holmes's writing style is very curated, easy to follow and fast paced, which makes the book a perfect read to get you out of a reading slump or to evade you of your own life for some hours. And even though this is the first book in the Bluebird series, it's clear that she already has the story well thought out and tied, with no loose ends.
I'm giving The Silent Bluebird four stars mostly because Holmes's writing can be exploited and improved, because as you read you can see how it evolves through the story, and it changes quite a lot from the beginning to the end of the book. That makes me think that her next books will be even better. And also because I don't enjoy much the cliffhangers at the end of books, even if they're part of a series, because if I don't want to keep reading them I want to be able to leave the series without that intrigue of what's going to happen next. But I can assure you that I will want to read the next Bluebird book, because I've fallen into Sadie's story just like she's fallen into Killian's.
Thanks to Elle M. Holmes and NetGalley for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Genre: spy fiction, science fiction.
Trigger warnings: blood, death, injuries, murder, violence.
