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Remarkably Bright Creatures
A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
“Remarkably Bright Creatures is a beautiful examination of how loneliness can be transformed, cracked open, with the slightest touch from another living thing.” -- Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here
For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus
After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.
Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.
Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.
Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.
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Reviews
In this book, you can easily guess the answer to the “mystery”, but then to make that worse, midway through the book, the mystery is actually directly answered for the reader - but not the characters - and so you spend the book wishing the characters would make better choices to lead them to an inevitable and obvious end. It’s a sweet and easy story to read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends for a “good read”.
By .kdub.
I really wanted to love this book after reading the reviews but I found it so boring and confusing to keep track of all the characters that never developed into anything. Not sure I read the same book as all the people who loved it.
By Meme112
Great read! A lovely mystery-esque novel that explores grief and loss in a relatable, humorous way. Characters were life like. Very well written!
By A credible reviewer
This starts off a little bit slow but it would be hard to not love this book by the end of it. Van Pelt does a great job at creating a small-town setting and raising interesting, character-specific questions throughout it, and then answering them in extremely satisfying (and sweet) ways by the end. There’s not much of a memorable writing style to this, but the cleverness, and overall warmness of the book is strong enough to make this a 4.5/5. Absolutely worth a read for anyone looking for an easy-to-read and wholesome story.
By Mike Ezepchick
I don’t give five stars easily, but this book definitely deserves it. Prepared to be enchanted and moved. I loved all the characters. My favorite? Marcellus, of course.
By ABQBlythe