We’re told Ellie took $2,000 from her ex-husband when she left, but in what way does this money last for a year? Though I wanted to be patient with Ellie, I grew annoyed with her. For about a year she lives with her friend Patty and won’t get a job. In the first 175 pages, Ellie gets divorced and discovers she loves watching birds. Unfortunately, the choice of when to go into depth with the plot feels a bit misguided. Ellie spends a good amount of time in San Diego with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend where Ellie sees that development happens everywhere, which she considers a horrible disease of mankind that breaks her heart. Over a year later she eventually returns to college to get a degree in biology, but once she finishes, she realizes that there are two kinds of biologists: the academic who wants to study wildlife to write a paper for recognition, and the field biologist (a dying breed) who tries to do something about the problem of over-development of open areas. Although she meets new men along the way, including one who loves and waits for her, Ellie is mostly focused on watching birds. When she accidentally goes on the wrong day to her church picnic, she discovers a group who loves bird watching, which becomes the catalyst for her divorce. The novel starts in Michigan in 1982 with 26-year-old Ellie sitting at home, waiting for her husband to love her more than the TV. Clocking in at 500 pages, Birdbrain covers a lot of ground. Birdbrain is a self-published (2014) novel by Virginia Arthur.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |