Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier

Written by Tracy Chevalier
Read by Charlotte Parry
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
Release date: 01-05-10
Publisher: Penguin Audio

A voyage of discovery, two remarkable women, and an extraordinary time and place and shines a light on women usually excluded from history—and on the simple pleasures of friendship.

On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary Anning learns that she has a unique gift: “the eye” to spot fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man.

Mary soon finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, a middle-class spinster who shares her passion for scouring the beaches. Their relationship strikes a delicate balance between fierce loyalty, mutual appreciation, and barely suppressed envy, but ultimately turns out to be their greatest asset.

Vivid, rewarding tale of 19th-century fossil hunter Mary Anning. Chevalier handles the science with a deft hand, but her real subject is two women barred from the professional community of men who are also denied access to the more acceptable roles of wife and mother. (Mary’s”unwholesome” pursuits and working-class background put her beyond the pale of proper society.). Yet somehow Mary and Elizabeth thrive, and the novel glories in their substantial achievements against considerable odds.

Before Darwin’s findings rocked the world, a small group of scientists were already—in some people’s view, blasphemously—questioning the age of the Earth, the finality of God’s creation and the possibility of an ancient world before man.

CRITIC’S VERDICT Superbly creating a unique setting, as she did in “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”, Chevalier captures the atmosphere of a chilly, blustery coast and an oppressive social hierarchy in real Dickensian fashion. Readers of historical fiction will enjoy this fascinating tale of rustic paleontology.