This story is about love, about knowing ones' self; it's about discovery, deep emotion; it's about perseverance; it's about the untapped strength of women. Beautifully written.
P.233 "In practice, it's difficult to resist the impulse to fill the silence, to let the person you love off the hook, to let them be."

In 1941, at seventeen years old, Meridian begins her ornithology studies at the University of Chicago. She is soon drawn to Alden Whetstone, a brilliant, complicated physics professor who opens her eyes to the fundamentals and poetry of his field, the beauty of motion, space and time, the delicate balance of force and energy that allows a bird to fly.

Entranced and in love, Meridian defers her own career path and follows Alden west to Los Alamos, where he is engaged in a secret government project (later known to be the atomic bomb). In married life, though, she feels lost and left behind. She channels her academic ambitions into studying a particular family of crows, whose free life and companionship are the very things that seem beyond her reach. There in her canyons, years later at the dawn of the 1970s, with counterculture youth filling the streets and protests against the war rupturing college campuses across the country, Meridian meets Clay, a young geologist and veteran of the Vietnam War, and together they seek ways to mend what the world has broken.

so after I read this book I read the other reviews...both positive and negative. All very interesting. You should definitely read the less starred reviews. I can see some points in their criticism. I don't always agree but I can see it You will like this book or not...just as with any other book Personally I loved the story and had to keep reminding myself of the time period in which it took place. We tend to forget the role of women in those times. Definitely a lot of discussion for a book club!