Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier

Book Overview

From the New York Times bestselling novelist, a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever.

On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: "the eye" to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452296722
• ISBN13: 9780452296725
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Loved it

the characters are great and the fossil hunting is very interesting. cool story

Renarkably Unreadable

Hard to believe this is the author of the luminous "Girl With A Pearl Earring". Dense, unengaging and too boring to finish.

Amazing Curiosities (aka Curies, ie Fossils)

Tracy Chevalier creates a fascinating fictional story about romance, jealousy and friendship between two women of vastly different backgrounds. It is loosely based on some historical facts from the life of Mary Anning an avid amateur fossil hunter who provided the world some important and interesting discoveries. She was the first to discover a complete pteradactyl (now called a pterasaur) and the squaloraja, a transition animal between sharks and rays. Her icthysaurus and pleiosaurus discoveries even today are on on display at the Natural History Museum in London. Her headless plesiosaur is on display at the Paleontology Gallery of the Museé National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The story begins when Elizabeth Philpot reminisces how she and her sisters ended up living in the seaside resort of Lyme in reduced circumstances compared to their life in London. After their parents had died, their brother John married and he helped them relocate to live within their means of 150 pounds annual income. Elizabeth was 25 years old and realized all the reasons which existed that would cause her to remain a single woman, called a spinster in that era. Her sister Louise who enjoyed gardening was also likely to remain unwed but for different reasons. Their youngest sister Margaret who was fresh and pretty, with pleasing facial features, stood the best chance of finding a suitor and possible marriage partner. They moved to a stone cottage suitable to their new status. Elizabeth took up the unladylike activity of collecting fossils which washed up on the shore. Through this activity, she became good friends with Mary Anning, a working class girl who had "the eye" which meant she found fossils much quicker than almost anyone else and the ones she discovered had some unique and unusual features. Mary was the first to discover the bones of a large creature which caused a great deal of controversy within the town. It also caused difficulty for the local ministers who could not explain its place within the order of God's creation as written in Genesis. Her discovery and skills made her famous among paleontologists in London who came to Lyme to meet her with the hope of discovering the bones of another ancient creature to add to their collection at Oxford University. Unfortunately, she did not receive credit for her discoveries nor did she obtain the monetary rewards one would expect for such unique finds. However, with courageous action on Elizabeth's part, Mary's name, reputation and fame become well established and their nearly broken friendship is repaired. I love how the author wove various elements from the reality of Mary Anning's life into the fictional account. Using creative license, Tracy Chevalier added new male characters which provided the element of tension in the friendship between Elizabeth and Mary. One of the characters was handsome and close in age to Elizabeth but unfortunately for her, he paid more attention to Mary and her special talent f

Bravo!

I strongly disagree with the mean-spirited Publishers Weekly review--which does a disservice to author Chevalier's accomplishment in melding fact and fiction in this gentle, well-told tale. It is a novel about friendship above all else. Fossils place a close second--the painstaking search for them and the thrill of their discovery, the effort to comprehend the life-forms they represent. The author succeeds so well at describing this searching that goes on from start to finish that I had to pause with refreshed eyes to examine my own sad little collection of fossils. At its core, this is a quiet tale about two women drawn into friendship by their love for fossils. It is also about Elizabeth Philpot's quest to get young Mary Anning the recognition she deserves for finding and revealing the extraordinary creatures caught in stone. Like any friendship, theirs hits some bumpy patches but the two women rise from the pages as very real people: admirable, annoying and, ultimately, likeable and sympathetic. The secondary characters are all well-defined--a few deft brushstrokes and they come to life, especially Mary's mother, the feisty Molly and Elizabeth's sisters Louise and Margaret. The men, too, get up and march about (or ride, well above the crowd, as in the case of the stupidly arrogant Lord Henley) or bounce cheerily onto the pages in the body of William Buckland. The characters are unpredictable, given to acts both of kindness and uncaring dismissiveness--but they are never dull or boring. Mary and Elizabeth return to life in the author's skilled reworking of their lives. Highly recommended.

A remarkable novel

I made the unfortunate mistake of reading Chevalier's "The Virgin Blue" after reading--and loving--"The Lady and the Unicorn". I found "The Virgin Blue" such a letdown that it made me wonder if "Lady" was a fluke. I wanted to read more Chevalier just to make sure, but I was also a bit hesitant to do so because I have such an enormous backlog of books to read. When I saw this novel, though, I decided to give Chevalier a chance and, I'm happy to say, I now think it's "Blue" that was the fluke. "Remarkable Creatures" is a tale of the remarkable fossils uncovered by a remarkable woman, Mary Anning, who, with the help of a long and remarkable friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, earned the credit she richly deserved. The tale is a fictionalized account of Anning's life and of her friendship with Philpot, and the author does acknowledge that she took some artistic license. Still, I think Chevalier has done a wonderful job of drawing attention to a woman who was, for me, an unknown historical figure. Yet, without Anning, a lot of what we now know about the creation of the world and the extinction of its ancient creatures may never have come to light. Chevalier does a fine job of giving voice to Mary. Though Mary never received a formal education, Chevalier shows how Mary educated herself. The contrast between Mary's enlightenment and the reluctance of other, more learned people to accept the truths she uncovers is interesting. I found it interesting to speculate on whether some of the most esteemed minds of the time would have arrived at the scientific truths that we now take for granted, had it not been for the integral part Mary played in their uncovering. Equally interesting to me was the character of Elizabeth Philpot. Though born into a more genteel family, Elizabeth in many ways is even more limited than Mary. Elizabeth's passion for fossils is considered unseemly and the fact that she is a spinster living with two spinster sisters makes her a subject of some scorn among those equal to her in class. I find it inspiring to read tales of women like Elizabeth, who are willing to buck convention for the sake of claiming their own independence. The friendship between the two women is also nicely written. It is not a friendship that is all butterflies and roses. Just like any real life relationship, the friendship is strained at times by jealousy and strife. Both women learn from the other and, as a result, both women grow as characters. The tale of their friendship gives the novel an extra dimension. It becomes not just a book about the amazing scientific discoveries of an unschooled girl from Lyme, but also a novel about how empowering friendship between women can be, especially in an age as unfriendly to women as that in which Mary and Elizabeth lived. Though, at that time, society encouraged women to surrender everything to men, the lives of Mary and Elizabeth show that it was often only other women upon whom women could depend.

Dinosaurs are a girl's best friend

In the restrictive, male-dominated world of early-1800s England, three adult sisters are settled in a seaside cottage by their brother, the new head of the family after the demise of their parents. Class weighs heavily on all their minds; they are genteel middle-of-the-roaders, not gentry, and certainly not working-class, but not overflowing with money. Their quaint little cottage in a backwater community called Lyme Regis promises peace, quiet, and a freedom they don't have in London. Elizabeth Philpot, the one amongst the sisters who could charitably be called slightly rebellious, finds joy in prowling the seaside, looking for fossil fish and ammonites that wash in on the shore. Margaret, the youngest sister, spends her time in card-playing and seasonal balls, the silly sister of the three; and Louise takes comfort in gardening. It is Elizabeth, however, who sets in motion events that revolutionize the world of natural science. She strikes up a friendship with a young girl of the town in which they live, a child of working-class parents constantly fending off the workhouse. Mary Anning, another forthright, plain-speaking female, supplements her father's earning as a carpenter by hunting fossils on the beach, like Elizabeth. What Elizabeth does as a hobby, Mary does to support her family. Mary has a gift, however; an eye to find more than fossilized marine shellfish - and her discovery of what she calls a 'crocodile' brings men of learning to her door. In this novelized account of events, the author, Tracy Chevalier - what a great name for a writer! - presents a tale of real people, who stood the world of fossil-hunting on its ears. Many people in this book actually existed, usually in the context in which they lived, and the story is engrossing and different. The story screams for treatment as an English mini-series; I can almost cast some of the roles. Ms Chevalier seems obsessed with the English class system, which being foreign to American sensibilities may be hard for some to fathom, but in the time of 1804 England was most definitely a factor to be taken into account at every turn. Everyone had a place, and woebetide the person who stepped out of their own class. And the principal characters being women offers a new degree of lesser regard. Both Elizabeth and Mary strive against this suffocating attitude with greater or lesser success. They also have differences of opinion between themselves, while being aware how much they mean to each other as friends, even though they are so removed by age. I finished this book in a couple of days, a fast read for me. It rarely lagged, even though the suspense is a little scant; I cannot recall ever reading a book quite like this one. It goes chapter on-chapter off between Elizabeth and Mary, giving each an equal time to state what's going on in their heads, and the scenery of the beach, cliffs, town and city are vividly portrayed. As a historical novel, it succeeds in story and characters, and made

4.5 stars for an engaging portrait of two extraordinary 19th century women

Tracy Chevalier once again makes another time and place come alive in "Remarkable Creatures." I'm not particularly interested in fossils, but Chevalier presents such compelling accounts of two women who were, that she made me almost as interested in ammonites, ichthyosauruses and other extinct creatures as the fossil hunters and collectors who, in the early 19th century, changed scientists' views of the age of the earth and its history. Remarkable Creatures is told in the first person narratives of two women in Lyme-Regis, on the Southwest coast of England. Mary Anning is the poor daughter of a cabinet maker and a laundress, while Elizabeth Philpot is a spinster two decades Mary's senior. Elizabeth and her two sisters, Louise and Margaret, have just moved to Lyme-Regis, their fortunes having decreased to the point where although they are of an elevated social status, their newly married brother can no longer support them in London. Chance brings these two women from different generations and social classes together, and through their mutual love of fossils they become unlikely friends. They tell their stories in alternating chapters as they flirt with love, hunt for fossils on the desolate cliffs and beaches of the southwest coast, and struggle to find their place in a society in which they are constrained by both their gender and their social status. Chevalier has a gift for putting the reader squarely in another time and place and making them come alive. She also has the ability to delve into the workings of a trade as she did so skillfully in The Lady and the Unicorn (weaving) and Girl With a Pearl Earring (painting), here taking us into the workings of fossil hunting and preservation. Remarkable Creatures has less romance than either of the former, which I found to be a plus, but which faithful readers of Chevalier may consider a minus. The characters feel entirely real and refreshingly complex -- there are no real heroes or villains, just everyday people, acting in accordance with the beliefs and dictates of their time. The book is well written and easy to read through in one or two sittings, but not at all dumbed down. I give it 4 1/2 stars as Chevalier has a tendency in the more romantic portions of the book to become a bit melodramatic, but thankfully, the real romantic yearnings of the characters have to do with the unstable cliffs of the coast and the remarkable creatures these two truly remarkable creatures find on them. I finished this book with a tremendous respect for what these women went through to do what they loved, and a genuine appreciation for how their work contributed to my own worldview.