Blue sky, green trees

I was 100% loving this book, until a certain point. It should be said that it's less nature book and more travel book, in that the swallows and their routes help determine the author's route but that's about it; there isn't a book's worth of swallow in there, they are more like highlights.

Now for the spoiler:

This book was fantastic until the Gibraltar chapter. At that point the author has some sort of freakout for what really seems like no reason at all. He arrives in Europe and it's too quiet so he throws all his possessions into the sea? The hotel staff are less than fawning when he shows up "thin and brown and dirty" so he throws all his possession into the sea? There's too much military presence and so he throws his possessions into the sea? It's just too absurd for words. What it really sounds like is that he had a wonderful time being a white traveller in Africa, with all the novelty and attention this brought him, and now that he's back in Europe he's just another white dude and nobody is paying him a bit of attention and so he has a hissy fit and does the most destructive non-harm thing he can: he throws all his possessions into the sea.

Also note that "all his possessions" includes his notebooks in which he was documenting the trip. So this means that everything in the book that happened before his tantrum, and probably much of what happened afterwards too, is just his memories. Now I know that most popular non-fiction is actually a framework of fact that is then filled in with paraphrased conversations, half-remembered/ half-invented scenes, and outright fabrications for fun and interest; unless it is scholarly research, non-fiction is actually light on "just facts". That being said, it was really disappointing to find out that the author was making up basically everything.

I was enraged, outraged, furious the whole time I was reading this book. My throat was closed and my chest was tight, I felt like I was suffocating from helplessness and frustration with every turn of the page. And yet the book is fantastic, an absolute five star book. It feels weird to say that I loved a book that impacted me so negatively, but there we are - the power of books.

Holy shit this book is AMAZING!

Holy shit this book is AMAZING!

On the negative side it was slow moving and some of the plot points were painfully predictable. On the positive side it had moments where the pace really picked up, and there were enough of them to keep me going through to the end (though I skimmed).