“Love – ach, boy, it’s best you steer clear of it,” his grandfather had warned him when he was just 14. In that particular department, people like them could only end up shipwrecked. If they were birds, his grandpa continued, they’d belong to the common murre species – brilliant gliders in the air, whose real problem only becomes apparent when they prepare to land: Suddenly, they are clumsy and come across as almost dopey – a state of affairs that doesn’t improve when they mate, build their nests and raise their young. Common murres, according to grandpa, are inclined to behave in complicated ways in relationships.
When his grandpa explained all this to him, there was no way he could have known that he actually really was just about to execute his first romantic crash landing: His childhood friend Lucretia, whom he has spent almost every minute with since the age of three, will soon come to prefer the company of the butcher’s apprentice over his. Worse yet, without any warning, from one day to the next, she will simply disappear.
