Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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If the gimmick of the octopus was removed, would I still like this book? Hmmmm

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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  Books with quirky narrators are always a risk going into them. Some are great; The curious incident of the dog in the night-time offered a fresh perspective, The Book Thief was better for its narrator; while others like The seven moons of Maali Almeida left me a little cold. This one sits somewhere between the two ends. Ostensibly the story of Marcellus the Octopus coming to the end of his life in captivity, he serves more as a framing device for Tova and Cameron’s lives coming […]

“Day 1,361 of My Captivity . . . ” CBRBINGO – Rec’d

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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I tried to read this last year? The year before? And couldn’t bring myself to get very far, for whatever reason. But recently I was working on a reading vlog where I was only going to read books with animal narrators, and I thought it might be a good time to try this book again. It stuck this time! Remarkably Bright Creatures follows three main narrators: Tova, a widow whose son also died when he was seventeen, who is now a janitor at an aquarium; […]

i would like more books with octopus protagonists

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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Tova is a quiet, hardworking woman who still mourning the loss of her 18 year old son and more, recently, her husband. She has taken a job as a night janitor at the Sowell Bay Aquarium in order to keep busy. Marcellus is the resident Giant Pacific Octopus in the aquarium. And Cameron is an unmoored young man whose search for information about his parents leads him to Sowell Bay. What would have been a perfectly nice little story about people finding and making family […]

maybe I just don’t like octopi

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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This book was EVERYWHERE for a bit, wasn’t it–“the octopus book”. I tried, I really did, but reading this was like pulling teeth. Everything about it felt so aggressively predictable. It’s like the author learnt some cool facts about octopuses, had an idea for a book with a sassy main character with hidden depths, and dreamt this neat DRAMATIC CONNECTIVE TWIST…but then they got thrown into a blender, and the result was a book that’s painfully over-foreshadowed, like it’s just begging you to race to […]

Octopus’s Garden-Variety Novel

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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Seventy-year-old Tova Sullivan works as a cleaner at a local aquarium to keep busy after the death of her husband. While doing so, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, who happens to be a Giant Pacific octopus. Marcellus is not just any ordinary sea creature, however. He is supremely intelligent and a cunning escape artist, prone to late-night adventures like invading the other creatures’ habitats and even the aquarium’s offices. Marcellus even narrates some chapters, dating each from the start of his captivity, […]

You had me at octopus

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

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After watching My Octopus Teacher on Netflix and reading Montgomery Sy’s The Soul of an Octopus, (which was interesting, even though I had some problems with it), I’ve grown very fond of octopuses. They are smart, curious, have brains in their legs, can change colors, and can squeeze through almost any tiny hole. They recognize and remember people and will treat the ones they like differently. So, when I saw that Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022) by Shelby Van Pelt had an octopus as a narrator, I was immediately intrigued. However, […]



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