I’m quite alone is this assessment of Remarkable Creatures. Eveything is a flat tale in alternate voices as the two women take turn to relate the events. In the 111 first pages, there is no hint of social analysis, no hope for psychological insight in the characters’ inner minds.

It could have been a thorough description of the life in a quaint little English town, but no. I didn’t get attached to the characters, which is the basis for that kind of book to work. And the style! It took Ms Chevalier twenty pages to describe how they detached a crocodile fossil from the cliff and all in a dull style. So many fossils names and no scientific explanation I didn’t even have the satisfaction to learn something nor was my curiosity picked enough to research the names on the internet. Now, why didn’t I like it? I have a French edition, so my English has nothing to do with it. Feminism, history, 19thC England, all these are good tags for me. It tells the real story of Mary Anning, a paleontologist and her struggle to reach recognition in a men’s world and in a world where science was for upper classes. It is the story of a friendship between two women who have a very unladylike passion for fossils. It happens in the King George era, like Austen’s novels. It is set in Lyme Regis, England, a place I visited last year and it’s always nice to read a book when you know the setting. In appearance, Remarkable Creatures has several ingredients of a book I should like.

That was the final blow, I stopped exactly at page 111 and the book has 415 pages. But I had to acknowledge that I started to shy away from the book and I’d rather not read at all than read it.

Of course, I feel guilty and at the beginning I wanted to stick with it and endure it until the end for the sake of that readalong. I’m afraid this review is going to be a breach in the book blogging etiquette: I abandoned the book of my own readalong. Remarkable Creatures is this month read for our book club Les Copines d’abord and it is also a readalong for other bloggers interested in reading this novel.

Remarkable creatures book review