poon_jason

“They did not look like snakes to me, or any other animal I knew of. I walked out onto the ledge stepping with care so as not to tread on the creatures, even if they were clearly long dead and not so much corporeal bodies but sketches in the rock. It was difficult to imagine them as alive once. They looked permanent, as if they’d always been in the stone.” Imagine a Jane Austen character discovers a monster fossilized in the cliffs by the beach. And to my mind, that is precisely what you get when you read Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures. In addition to the fascinating story of real-life women blazing a trail in paleontology, the reader is also confronted with the social mores facing nineteenth century women. The narrator is first person, switching back and forth between two women of different classes, but whom become friends because of their passion for finding fossils. I’m a big fan of Tracy Chevalier. Her works of historical fiction never seem to disappoint, and Remarkable Creatures ranks right up there with her best.

2022-11-14 14:19