Breakaway Books

Authored by Belinda Bauer; Published April 2025; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️

I enjoyed The Impossible Thing, in spite of myself. A novel centered on the bizarre obsession of the English upper class with collecting bird eggs? Sounds like a pass from me—and yet, it captured my attention and made me chuckle more than a few times.

The Impossible Thing intertwines two stories: Celie Sheppard and her life-changing discovery of the Metland egg in the early twentieth century, and Patrick’s attempts to unravel the theft of said egg from his friend Weird Nick’s house nearly a century later. Celie is the child of an illicit affair, who drives her mother’s husband off the farm and redeems herself through a contract with greedy egg dealer George Ambler, who pays 40 pounds every year to the skint Metland Farm for the ruby red Metland egg that Celie fetches. Patrick is a simple boy who just wants to help his friend Nick track down an item stolen from him, only to unwittingly step into a war between conservationists and collectors.

I have to say, this is one of the novels that makes me love reading. I never would have learned about the (strange) practice of collecting guillemot eggs in early twentieth century England, nor the ridiculous prices men paid for them, had I not picked up this novel. The author excels not only at painting the narrative realistically and intricately, but making me care about it. I was grieved and angered by the unfairness of Celie’s life; I cheered when she found her love; I mourned again when it was taken from her too soon. Ambler, the greedy and lecherous villain, may have been one-dimensional, but who wouldn’t celebrate his downfall?

Nick and Patrick’s story felt less dramatic, but provided nearly all the humor in the novel. Patrick’s social awkwardness and extreme literalism not only lends lightness to the narrative, but is also portrayed in such a way that I could not help but feel tenderly toward him. His heart was clearly too pure for the events happening around him. There were red herrings aplenty as Nick and Patrick comically  stumbled through their ‘investigation,’ which made the mystery itself highly enjoyable, but the glance into the competition between the obsessive collectors and the militant conservationists was what really drew my interest. Two factions, passionate about birds—just in extremely different ways. Which would resort to theft and destruction?

The Impossible Thing is an offbeat mystery, but if you’re willing to experience something new, you won’t regret it.