Thursday, September 22, 2016

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier

Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier (4.0)

As with ‘The Girl with the Pearl Erring’, Ms. Chevalier has taken real people and circumstances and evolved a novel of possible interactions and feelings for them.  In this case, it involves a pair of fossil hunters in Britain pre-Darwin. They are unique as both are women with one being quite poor and the other a upper class spinster. They meet on the beach and soon the poor young woman finds a dinosaur skeleton. With the help of the better-connected lady, the bones make their way into the collector’s and ultimately a museum. Most interesting was the way their discovery was treated- both due to the gender of the discoverers and due to the time period. The term ‘extinct’ made no sense. The majority of scholars did not believe that anything has died off – that would imply that God made a mistake, which is unthinkable! This discovery and subsequent ones from the same fossil seeker help drive the scholars to doubt earlier thinking. I’m not always a fan of historical fiction, as it tends to blur my memory of what is real and what is not. In this case, I appreciated that these people lived, but that the author added the drama and personalities, which brought this bit of history to light. She took an interesting real occurrence and added details of the society and difficulties for women of the time (a bit Jane Austen-ish). I’m sure most people reading this cringed when the 3 unmarried sisters had to move to a small city on the coast – because their brother got married and he was ‘responsible’ for them. Ugh.

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