Fiction Pick of the Week: Remarkable Creatures

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier 2010

I am a huge Tracy Chevalier fan, so when Remarkable Creatures was published, I made sure I was early in the holds line. The book did not disappoint! This time Chevalier writes about the fossil discoveries in the cliffs of southern England in 1810. Remarkable Creatures, while a novel, is based on the true story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as the ichthyorsaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world. Mary is an uneducated working class girl working in an arena dominated by middle-class men. She is not taken seriously by the academics of her day. She is equally ostracized from her own community of Lyme Regis. Fortunately she is befriended by a prickly London spinster, Elizabeth Philpot, who shares Mary's passion for fossils. Remarkable Creatures is about a friendship which sees them through struggles with poverty and rivalry, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It could be argued that the "remarkable creatures" that Chevalier writes about are indeed these two amazing women.

Watch the trailer here: