Unflappable (Suzie Gilbert)

Unflappable
Suzie Gilbert
Perch Press
Fiction, General Fiction/Humor/Romance
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When environmental activist and animal lover Lune Burke's marriage hit the rocks, her billionaire magnate husband Adam decided to try wooing her back to their Florida estate with a gift: Mars, the male bald eagle she helped rehabilitate as a teenager in Pennsylvania. In taking the animal from its sanctuary home, he callously and unthinkingly separated the bird from Banshee, its mate... and ended any chance of reconciliation with Lune. Rather than let Adam hold the eagle hostage to get her to come back home, Lune reaches out to her friends in the animal rehabilitation community, plotting a daring birdnapping that breaks at least a dozen state and federal laws as she seeks to get Mars back to Banshee and both out of Adam's reach. All she needs is an accomplice, at least for the first leg of the trip - someone with a car big enough to hold a bald eagle-sized animal cage. Someone like Ned, the tech nerd who only showed up at the animal rehabilitation facility where she volunteers because his company forces their employees to do community service activities, but who happens to drive a classic convertible with the perfect back seat for Mars. Thus begins a cross-country flight from the law and from Adam's goons, and one nerd's baptism by fire into the close-knit world of wildlife activism.

REVIEW: Unflappable is just what it promises: a road trip romance starring a misfit couple who inevitably develop feelings for each other, a grasping man whose definition of love is possession, and a colorful cast of side characters (and animals), with an animal rehabilitation and conservation theme.
Lune is much like the eagle she loves: mishandled as a child in ways that leave her psychologically scarred, longing for nothing but a freedom that the world in general and her husband in particular seem determined to deny her. Like a wild animal, even the threat of a cage is enough to send her on the attack, be that cage tangible or intangible. Ned, her companion of circumstance, doesn't know or particularly care about animals in general or birds in particular; he was just at the rehab clinic to check off a box of his employment requirement, not to get roped into a crazy cross-country trek with a razor-clawed protected species in the back seat of his classic car. Along the way, he inevitably comes to understand just what all these strange people he meets are fighting for, if largely driven by his growing feelings for the peculiar Lune, and finds himself taking risks he never imagined for a bird he only ever develops a grudging tolerance of. They find themselves on the wrong side of the law, though the agent pursuing them can't help having mixed feelings about the whole affair, and on the wrong side of Adam, who never met an obstacle he couldn't outspend or outbludgeon. In a way, Adam's obsession with Lune is almost tragic; by his selfish, materialistic standards, what he feels and does for her count as love, and he just cannot comprehend how Lune is never going to be the pretty pet on the diamond leash and pedestal that he wants her to be. The very thing about her that first attracted him - her wild freedom and complete defiance of his expectations, her rejection of the money and the lifestyle he leads - is the very thing that's in their way, the very thing he keeps trying to destroy with his possessive behavior.
The road trip involves numerous encounters with numerous eccentric characters, some more helpful than others, and close scrapes with both the wildlife agent and Adam's thugs. The plot moves pretty well, with few people being outright obtuse to prolong or complicate things, and some memorable wildlife encounters. The weakest part, though, is the ending, which feels a little too drawn out and loses some of its impact. I also found the audiobook presentation, which changes off between male and female narrators almost at random, a bit odd, but I got used to it. All in all, I got what I expected out of this story.

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