A Remarkably Good Book

Remarkably Good Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Pages: 368 Genre: literary fiction

Rating: 5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights

Tova Sullivan is an older woman who is grieving the loss of both her husband, who died from cancer a few years ago, and her son, who died tragically in a drowning accident when he was 18. But she finds it easier to cope when she's busy, so she starts working at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, cleaning the floors and keeping the rooms tidy. One night, she becomes acquainted with the grumpy old Giant Pacific Octopus, Marcellus. Marcellus knows more about most things than he lets the humans believe, and he's not interested in getting to know his captors. Except for Tova. So, when Marcellus realizes he knows what happened to Tova's son thirty years ago, he has to use every avenue he can to help her understand.

I knew I was going to love this book, but it's taken me such a long time to read it. I'm so glad that I finally did, though. It's a very unique book, and I never would've guessed that an octopus having a point of view would be endearing instead of silly, but it worked really well.

In addition to Marcellus (although he is the shining star of the book), I found all the characters very charming. The author did a good job building out the town by giving just enough details about the townspeople without overloading us with information. But I thought all the main characters were lovely, and Tova was a really good main character.

I also really liked the way grief was handled in this book. It characterizes a lot of the main characters, but all in very unique ways. Seeing a variety of people move and grow within different kinds of grief was really interesting, and I found it to be a very compelling way to characterize everybody.

Literary fiction is a hard genre to excel in, but I thought the story of this one was very well done. It's a little "slice of life," although there's a clear end point that we're moving towards. I really liked watching the story unpack, even though there was definitely no mystery about what was going to happen. And it was quite the emotional rollercoaster — we really had to earn that ending.

This was just a very sweet book. Emotional, thought-provoking, and engaging. It's one that will stick with me for a while.