I like Tracy Chevalier, and basically liked Remarkable Creatures, but it didn't blow me away. It's an interesting concept, to be sure. Chevalier took the true story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, both heavily involved in fossil discoveries in the late 1800s, and imagined the story-behind-the-story. After I finished the novel, I was interested to read her afterword which gave the specifics about what the actual facts were. There were only a couple of parts of the book that I thought were probably anachronistic leaps of imagination (putting modern-day sensibilities that would have been more unlikely in those times), but since my sense of the period is largely built through other novels anyway, I could easily be wrong.

Chevalier is very good at giving a strong sense of time, place, and character. I feel like I've got a better sense of what it may have been like for society to first start becoming fully aware of fossils and what impact they had on our collective sense of self. She did a good job at interweaving story with the history of scientific discovery.

I have mixed feelings about her use of two different characters for first person POVs. She uses the classic technique of having a section told by one character, then the next section told by the other character, alternating throughout. The sections are fairly lengthy so it's not a quick switch back and forth. On the one hand, it's always interesting to get two perspectives on a situation, and Chevalier does give a good feel for the potential difference in perspective between two socio-economic classes. On the other hand, you're just becoming emotionally connected to and invested in a character when you're suddenly shoved out and needing to dive back into the head of the other character--it can be a little jarring and frustrating at some junctures. It always took me a few pages to get reconnected with the person whose perspective I was now in, so the technique had the effect of keeping me from being able to really emotionally invest myself in the story or what happened to any particular character at all. I felt a few steps removed from everything.

So my overall feeling is that I really enjoyed the first third of the book as I was appreciating the set-up, the history, the sense of a time-space moment. I still enjoyed, but a little less so, the middle third of the book as the characters and events were fleshed out further. I read the last third fairly rapidly just to find out how Chevalier was going to end the story, but without any tremendous great interest in how it ended. If I'd been able to stay more emotionally connected with any one character, I'd probably have enjoyed the book more thoroughly straight through.

Remarkable Creatures is, again, a unique idea, well written, and interesting from the perspective of scientific history and women's issues viewed through fiction. It just didn't grab me in the way I was hoping.

Remarkable Creatures - Likewise Book Reviews

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