Beth Pickering is not only a professor of Ornithology at Oxford, but she is the youngest person to gain a professorship in the country. She has aspirations of rooting out the magical origins of some breeds of birds even though the others in her department feel like such an endeavor is a waste of time. Unfortunately, as an academic, she isn't exactly flush with cash and able to go into the field for her research as often as she likes.
That's where Ms. Hippolyta Spiffington-Quirm comes into the picture. Hippolyta is rich and an avid birder. In fact, she has won the International Ornithological Society's (IOS) International Birder of the Year Award several times, as she has the money to fund expeditions around the world to hunt down the rarest and most exotic magical birds, regardless of where they can be found. Beth and Hippolyta have a good working relationship, mostly because Beth is always agreeable to the other woman and will do whatever it takes to stay in her good graces.
Devon Lockley is in a similar boat. Touted as a young prodigy, he is a professor of Ornithology at Cambridge (despite being educated at Yale, of all places), and he finds himself employed by Klaus Oberhufter, a German gentleman who is determined to usurp Hippolyta's Birder of the Year title. While Devon has fewer scruples than Beth, he also prefers the more academic aspects of Ornithology over that of the competitive nature of the IOS's high society members. That being said, he really doesn't have a problem with the fact that he and Oberhufter snatched a particularly rare specimen right from under Beth and Hippolyta. Unfortunately, Beth and Hippolyta know just how cutthroat the business of Ornithology is, and once their quarry has escaped, they recognize that the only proper thing to do is return home to England and lick their wounds.
What no member of the IOS expects is a sudden competition. It seems that a rare bird with magical healing abilities called a Caladrius has been sighted "somewhere in England." The IOS announces that whomever can capture and deliver this bird will be awarded the Birder of the Year title, regardless of any other contributions submitted that year. While this alone is enough to set most of the birders into a tizzy (some even spilling their tea), it's the second award that gets Beth and Devon interested, tenure. With the long road of tenure cut short, Beth could pursue her research without worrying about the opinions of her fellow professors.
What follows is a race from France to England (and all around the countryside). While it's a given that birders are cutthroat and, at any point, they will all attempt to sabotage each other, it seems like even old, established relationships like that between Hippolyta and Beth quickly fall apart at the chance of a one-time hunt for the prestigious award. Of course, nothing so crass as Hippolyta actually tossing Beth to the side actually happens. The two just happen to get separated time and time again. While Beth isn't surprised that Hippolyta wants to claim the title for herself (there can only be one winner, after all), she can't help but feel like there are other pressures at play as well. For one, she keeps finding herself unexpectedly teamed up with that rake, Devon Lockley.
As the forces of the competition keep pushing the two together, they find themselves not only matched in capability, but also wit and intelligence. As the reader might expect, a romance starts to bloom between them, but the rules of proper etiquette and perception make for an amusing additional force applied to the pair of ornithological professors.
While I found that most of the characters in The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love were a bit flat (mostly being motivated only by winning the IOS award), that is in contrast to Beth and Devon themselves. I assume, based on how well the two main characters are written, that this is by design as the other members in the competition end up acting more like forces to push the pair further down the plot than actual fully developed characters. Even the bigger side characters of Hippolyta and Oberhufter mostly appear as ways to push Beth and Devon either further into each other's arms or further down the road to the next stop in the hunt.
Beth and Devon, on the other hand, have a lot of depth and complexity to them and readers get a lot of that when inside each character's heads. They are fighting their urges to be together, as well as the fear that they will be betrayed, so that the other person will win the award (tenure), but even when they try to go their separate ways, they keep getting pushed together (and surely, that has nothing to do with the pair of publicists hired by the IOS to drum up interest in Ornithology that seems to be following them).
On top of Beth and Devon though, there is another "character" that I found myself really enjoying in this book, and that's the narration itself. There are many times when, in the perspective of a character, that character is thinking/feeling a certain way, but for the sake of propriety, those few words are struck through and a more appropriate term follows. For instance, at one point when our heroes are confronted by a journalist (something that happens oddly frequently), Devon's thoughts are expressed like this:
They stared at him incredulously, but he went on grinning likeThis is a frequent little quirk scattered about the book. Also, there are times when the narration itself makes observations as if it is a storyteller adding his own bit of flavor to the events. Ultimately, this just gives the book a unique feel that I found wholly enjoyable.a lunatican entertainment journalist.
Quite frankly, that's a great way to sum up this book. It's quirky, a fun read and an amusing romantic fantasy book that traipses around the countryside. The fact that the setting puts the main characters in a state of pitting their growing feelings against propriety, all while the entire country seems to be pushing for them to be together, just adds to the overall quality of the book. Throw in a few near-death experiences with magical birds and this really is a fun experience for anyone looking for a light read. I can't wait for the next book in the series, The Geographer's Map to Romance.
