"Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier

"Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier is the November pick for my Gateway (now Lighthouse) Women NoMo book club. (Zoom discussion date TBA, but it's generally late in the month.) It's based on the true story of two remarkable real-life women, who take turns narrating the story:  Elizabeth Philpot and Mary Anning. 

After their brother marries, Elizabeth and her two middle-class, spinster sisters leave the London home where they grew up for a small cottage and a simpler (cheaper) life on the coast in Lyme Regis, which was also the setting for Jane Austen's "Persuasion." The book has an Austenish flavour -- it touches on some of the same themes as Austen's novels (class, marriage/spinsters, etc.) and takes place in 1810, around the same time period they were being published (in fact, the author and her novels are mentioned in passing).  

Intrigued by the fossils she finds on the beach, Elizabeth strikes up an improbable friendship with young Mary, the daughter of an impoverished local cabinetmaker who, despite her lack of education, is extremely knowledgeable about fossils and has an uncanny knack of finding them. This makes her an invaluable resource for the wealthy (male) collectors who tap her knowledge, buy fossils from her -- and then take credit for her discoveries. 

I probably wouldn't have found or picked up this book if it wasn't for the book club. I'm not sorry I read it -- I LIKED it -- it was well written and an interesting read. I learned a lot from it, and it made me think. But I can't say I LOVED it. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) 

For this reason, I'm giving this one a solid 3.5 stars on Goodreads -- but rounded down to 3 (instead of up to 4).  

The recent movie "Ammonite" is loosely based on Mary and her story -- albeit it's NOT an adaptation of this book specifically. At our last book club Zoom meeting, one of the women in the book club told us a hilarious story about seeing it with a group of older women who had read the Chevalier novel and assumed the story would be more or less what they had just read. Let's just say the movie had a distinctly 21st century speculative spin that these women did NOT expect!!  lol  (Here's an article from Time magazine about what's fact and what's fiction in the movie, and another from Esquire.) 

(As I was reading, I Googled Mary and Elizabeth to find out more about them.  Lo and behold, Mary and her fossils were in the news again!)   

This was Book #42 read to date in 2022 (and Book #1 finished in November), bringing me to 93% of my 2022 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 5 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2022 tagged as "2022 books."