Once she does get to class, though, I can see her trying to organize her life in a way that no one else around her has, so she’s a pioneer, really, in her small Michigan town. The day before school starts, Ellie decides she’ll be sleeping through the camping class, which is before her Biology class. Ellie seems in control of her relationship with men, once she’s divorced.Īfter those 175 pages, Ellie still isn’t a likable person she decides to go to school for biology, a degree for which her mother is paying, and in the first semester she signs up for two classes she doesn’t need (one of them being “Camping I”) and biology. Should the author choose such an obvious way to get Ellie, with her newly-broken heart, to “move on,” I would have felt disappointed. However, two characters, both Michigan Department of Fish and Game employees, are introduced during this time, and while it seems convenient that Ellie might fall in love with one of them, she doesn’t and for that I was thankful. There is also a lot of repetition in the first 175 pages, such as telling the same stories and experiences or visiting certain places, which didn’t push the story forward. 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.

Birdbrain by Virginia Arthur