I do too! I've just read so many of them that I've become a bit picky, I guess. Although actually "natural history buff" is different enough from most of the other sprightly intellectual girls (they are so often literary) that it should have piqued my interest on its own... Maybe the first third is just a bit slow in general.

And hooray for Benjamin January! The first two books are definitely the roughest in the series, emotionally speaking: I found Fever Season very hard to get through. But the series as a whole is lovely.