Review by crispycritter - Remarkably Bright Creatures

crispycritter 's review for:

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

3.5

I'm remembering now why I don't read 'book club' books. And maybe this just makes me an asshole - but this book, like many other Reece's/GMA/Jenna's picks are so middle of the road I come away wondering what the point of it all was. They don't meaningfully explore what it means to be a slowly decaying flesh puppet hurtling around a dying star on some dying rock. They aren't overly silly or irreverant or fun or macabre. It's like they're all about watching someone else's life that is just slightly worse or slightly better than your own do something mundane for 300 pages. Is this what well-adjusted people like to read? I think I'm just too mentally ill for these books. They don't make me FEEL. They just make me feel. Only a little. And that feeling never lasts.

I'm sure at least one person is reading this review and being all like, 'oh you can't review a book if you don't even like the genre,' but listen - even from a craft perspective this book isn't stellar. It's just ok.

There is a 'mystery' that's not really a mystery when you give said mystery its own POV chapters. *gasp* who could this character be??? Why are they important??? I figured out exactly where we were going ~20 pages.
I definitely don't think authors have to keep you guessing till the bitter end. In fact, solving mysteries or riddles can be one of the most satisfying parts of reading a book. I love a good ah ha! But, you know. Later. Much later. You solve The Big Mystery in Remarkably Bright Creatures in basically the beginning of the book. So rather than satisfaction, I just felt sustained frustration watching the characters slowly work their way toward answers. Dramatic irony works when there's a reason for this disconnect. I get into it a bit more below, but the 'conflict' of the book could have been solved by three characters having a conversation.
Leading the reader by the nose and just generally a lack of nuance. I didn't save any page numbers for this, so going off vibes, I just felt like - I was GETTING there, Van Pelt, and now I'm annoyed because you whacked me in the face with a newspaper right before I made the connection you wanted me to make.
The prose was nice. But distant. But nice. Like I said, I'm here to FEEL. Not feel.
The characters get interrupted throughout the book, once they have almost figured things out, in overly convenient ways. Example: Ethan MUST tell Tova something. She tragically
uses his grateful dead tee to clean up a wine spill and is so embarrassed
she storms out before Ethan can tell her. 1. That's SO convenient. 2. The woman is 70. She doesn't move that fast. TELL HER NOW. Cameron
calls his boss Terry to tell him he's leaving town but can't use his phone to communicate with his girlfriend - naturally, the universe conspires so that Avery doesn't get his in-person message. His phone breaks because we need a convenient way for Cameron to be gone but not able to communicate with the other characters.
The romance. As a voracious reader and defender of the genre of Romance, it grinds my gears that there's all this wonderful romance with beautiful interiority and character development that's not taken seriously because ~spice~ meanwhile, Cameron's romance is equivalent to La Croix - the barely-there suggestion of flavor. This book didn't need the hint of a romance for this little unrepentant dirtbag (who I actually liked as a character).
Speaking of characters - did anyone really grow? Or change? Cameron still seems like an unrepentant dirtbag, but he's just held down a job for a bit. Ethan is the same. Tova moves. Some of her friends move away. She makes a few more. I really didn't see enough to indicate that her relationship with
Ethan was anything beyond platonic, which is fine. But like I said, she had friends. So then he's just a new friend.
Marcellus
ends up in the ocean and we're to assume he died. That's a change in character, I suppose? :/
Marcellus: both unnecessary to the furtherance of the plot and the most enjoyable part of the book. Seriously, I got misty eyed reading his latter diary entries. Because this was a good book? Nah. Because the life of an octopus is intrinsically tragic - to be so brilliant and to live such short, violent lives in the wild. And to live such small lives in captivity. If you wrote a book where the dog died, even if it's the worst book in the world, I'm probably gonna cry. Some elements are just going to prey upon reader's emotions, even if they're not written well.
K1ll Your Darlings hot take - Marcellus. Sorry. All these characters end up in the same small town without his help. They all know each other. Some of them work together. Some of them are friends. To settle the plot of this book, they all really just needed to sit down and have a cup of coffee together. An octopus was cute and clever and witty - but at the end of the day, unnecessary.

Grump out.