Remarkably Bright Creatures

I loved Remarkably Bright Creatures. Some consider the main character to be Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus in an aquarium in Washington state. He was an important character, but not the main character. And while I did learn a good amount about giant Pacific octopuses, this was not a book about them.

Tova has been working as a cleaner at the aquarium for years. Keeping busy after the mysterious death of her son has always been important. She has her Knit Wit friends but otherwise keeps to herself. Somehow, she develops a relationship with Marcellus. And perhaps he holds the key to figuring out what happened to Tova's son.

Cameron is a young man dealing with one crappy thing after another and he's going to use his time of unemployment to find out a little more about his past. He believes that he might be able to learn more about his mother and find his father if he travels to Washington where her mother went to high school and where he believes he was conceived. 

The audiobook is narrated alternatively by Tova, Marcellus and Cameron. The voices of each were just perfect. The pace of the novel was wonderful. I enjoyed every minute. 

And then... I was mesmerized when I went to the Florida Aquarium a week or so after finishing the novel and spent a good amount of my time staring at their giant Pacific octopus. If only I could have gotten a better photograph of her. The reflections, the light (or lack of light), the water, the glass all contributed to making this a very hard photograph to capture. Watching her gave me such pleasure and made me think of Marcellus. How did she wind up in the aquarium? Did she long to be out of the aquarium and in the wild?

The Matchmaker's Gift

 

The Matchmaker's Gift which I suppose I would classify as "Magical Realism" if I had to pick a genre had rave reviews, from both friends and people in Renee's Reading Club. It made me think that Lynda Cohen Loigman's story about a Jewish matchmaker in the early 1900s and her granddaughter in the 1990s probably wasn't simply a light, fluffy romance novel. It was not.

As a small child on an immigrant ship from Europe, Sara and her family realize that she has a gift for helping people find their soulmates. As she gets older, it's a gift she wishes to capitalize on. However, the well-established matchmaking network in NYC at the time was exclusively older, married men. This went far beyond not being taken seriously. The establishment felt threatened by Sara and wanted her stopped.

After Sara's death, her granddaughter, Abby, a rising divorce attorney, is left all her journals. It took Abby a little while to figure out exactly what she was reading about. Then she wondered why it was left to her, what sort of message was her grandmother sending her, and what was she supposed to do with this information.

Told in two different timelines, this is a story about women trying to figure out their places in the world. Abby's story really resonated with me. She became a divorce attorney after living through her parents' terrible divorce. She felt her mother had been unheard during her divorce and she wanted to help other women who might end up in that situation. By the very end of the novel, I was thinking about my divorce attorney and about her history as a divorce attorney, first representing immigrant women who couldn't get a fair shake in divorce court.

The Matchmaker's Gift was a well-developed story that was easy and enjoyable to read.

This is the second novel that I've read and enjoyed by Lynda Cohen Loigman. The first was The Two Family House back in 2016.