"The Girl Who Drank The Moon" by Kelly Barnhill

This is by the same person who wrote Iron Hearted Violet, and honestly, both books of hers that I've read have had very good covers. (This is distinct from judging a book by its cover, because I'm just judging the covers by themselves.) 

And good news: its narration didn't annoy me! It was written in third-person limited omniscient this time, as I wished Iron Hearted Violet was, which fixed the annoying-narrator problem quite handily. And the pacing was a lot saner, too.

The principal point-of-view character (you basically look over the shoulder of one character at a time) is a very old witch named Xan; the other principal POV characters include an even older swamp monster named Glerk, a girl named Luna who accidentally drank moonlight (our titular Girl Who Drank The Moon), and a guy named Antain who has serious doubts about the dystopian city most of the book's NPCs live in.

Speaking of which, the NPCs (sorry, it's technically incorrect to call them NPCs since this isn't a game, but they basically are) do live in a dystopia run by a bunch of old dudes and their unsecret police force. Even the old dudes are somewhat scared of the unsecret police force, which they don't actually run; they just kind of ask it politely if it could do things. Things such as remove one baby each year on the same day from the dystopia, and leave it in the forest for the witch to take. Nobody knows what the witch in the forest does with the babies, they just know that she wants them and orders the old dudes to bring them to her.

Plot twist: there is no witch in the forest. There never was. The witch is a lie, made up by the old dudes so they can keep the people of the dystopia in fear and so maintain their power.

Plot twist: the witch is real after all, and it's Xan. She doesn't actually want the babies, she just knows that people abandon a baby at the same place every year for no discernable reason, so she takes them to other, non-dystopian cities and places them in foster homes.

Obvious fact: Luna is one of these abandoned babies.

And now for something completely different: talking about a recurring symbol! The one that stood out the most, for me, was the madwoman's. (She went insane when her daughter was the child who got left in the forest for the witch.) (Her daughter went on to be Luna. Is anyone surprised?) If there was such a thing as a leitmotif in a book, the madwoman's would be paper. The first hint we get of this is someone telling someone else, "She's not allowed to have paper. ...You'll see why." (Not an exact quote.) This is because... she already has paper. A lot of it. Enough to make thousands upon thousands of origami birds, some of which can move (hence the paper cranes on the cover).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard E10+ for some scary things; people get attacked by swarms of paper birds, and it is a dystopia.

I'm giving this 4 stars. It was good, but not good enough to get 5.

(Endnote: The dystopia and the old dudes and the unsecret police all actually have names, but I couldn't remember them while writing this and wasn't going to bother checking when the names I gave them work just as well.)