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 was bumped up a full star for me due to the inclusion of the octopus protagonist. Marcellus’ curmudgeonly, plainspoken insights were extremely endearing and added the right amount of both levity and gravity to the story. The author did a great job of making his voice distinct from the other characters’, and I liked how Marcellus drove the plot in a way that was charming and plausible — plausible because how often are humans blind to their own intuition? How often do we find ways to ignore evidence that is right before our eyes–things that even a clever and very non-human octopus would figure out immediately?
If I had one (ok, maybe two) gripe about this book it was that Cameron seemed like kind of a drag to be around – we get a lot of evidence of his flightiness and petulance but his good qualities were definitely more told than shown. I also in general hate the miscommunication trope in which major problems would have been avoided with a simple and obvious conversation. We veered dangerously close to this at several points, but the author kept it moving and I think the snappy pace and otherwise realistic characters (the author says that Tova was modeled after her own grandmother, and she definitely feels like a thorough, whole character) prevented these from being too annoying and obvious.
All in all, Van Pelt did a good job of making an otherwise pretty standard story into something interesting and heartwarming, with a balanced pace, a little heartbreak, realistic characters, and an endearing sea creature. It was a perfect read for my beach trip – although I unfortunately didn’t end up seeing any octopi.