The Impossible Thing is a curious little book. It’s part cozy-mystery, part coming of age novel, and part historical romance. It tells parallel stories about one hundred years apart, deftly using stylized prose to distinguish them for the reader. The story is unconventional without falling into the trap of being irritatingly quirky. While it’s by no means a classic, its charms will be readily apparent to most readers.
In 1920s Yorkshire, Celie Sheppard’s birth brings hardship on her farming family, as her mother’s husband immediately realizes Celie is not his, and takes off for good. The Sheppard’s are dirt poor until Celie happens to discover a useful skill: In a community full of “climmers” who retrieve and sell unusual bird eggs for huge sums, Celie is the only one small enough to fit into a particular gap in the cliffside on her family’s farm. When the egg she finds there turns out to be a solid, bright red color never seen before, the family’s fortunes change forever.
In the present day, Patrick Fort stumbles into the home of his only friend, Weird Nick, just after a home invasion robbery. The only thing taken from the home is a red egg Nick had found in the attic and listed on eBay. Patrick, who is on the autism spectrum, and Nick team up to try to figure out who took the egg and why. Their investigation leads them to the story of the Metland egg, so named for Celie’s farm all those years ago.
A significant portion of the book is an explainer on the history of rare-egg collecting, which was apparently a real mania in Britain in the early decades of the 20th century. It was eventually banned due to the harm it was causing to bird populations, and it became illegal to buy, sell, or own the eggs. Patrick and Nick encounter both a oologist studying bird eggs for a national museum and an officer of Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who feels strongly that egg collecting is humanity at its worst.
Bauer is nimble enough that all of this information flows into the narrative rather than stopping it cold, but in the aftermath it does strike you that you’ve absorbed a lot more information about eggs than you probably needed or wanted. The real joys of the novel are found in its characters, especially Celie, Patrick, and Nick, who will stick you a little longer than the egg info, I’m willing to bet.