Remarkable Creatures

On the way to and from Chicago, I took up Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures, a book that I've been meaning to read, but kept putting off. I've been a long time fan of Chevalier's, since Carol told me I need to read the Virgin Blue (she was right) and I have no idea why I let the book languish for so long. Fortunately, the library wouldn't let me renew it, so I had to read it.

Remarkable Creatures is the story of two women, separated by age, class and education, who build an unlikely and often strained friendship through their obsession with finding fossils in the early 1800's. Young Mary Anning sells the fossils she finds to tourists to support her family while spinster Elizabeth Philpot keeps her finds in carefully curated cases. Both are viewed with suspicion and ridicule by their seaside neighbors. When Mary finds the fossilized skeleton of what can only be imagined as a monster, their world changes as the religious and scientific community begin to debate the ramifications of the find.

Chevalier returns to themes she has explored in previous novels: self -determination, gender roles, the life of a person who does not conform to society's expectations, and the everyday lives of people living in watershed moments of history. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that the characters were actual people. Mary and Elizabeth's conversations with each other and other historical (and more famous) figures are fiction, but the main actions and their role in the early work leading up to Darwin's theory of evolution are our history. And while the history is 200 years old, it is incredibly relevant to today, as witnessed by the actions of the Texas Board of Education last week.