Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Tova’s quest to figure out what happened to Erik weaves her back into other people’s lives-and occasionally into someone’s tentacles.Ī debut novel about a woman who befriends an octopus is a charming, warmhearted read.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

Although Tova and other characters are dealing with serious problems like loss, grief, and aging, Van Pelt maintains a light and often warmly humorous tone. Tova is too preoccupied to pay attention to the sweet but awkward flirting of Ethan, the Scotsman who runs the grocery store, but she does get drawn into the complicated life of a young man named Cameron who wanders into Sowell Bay. Lately she’s been concerned about the way he's been escaping from his tank and cruising through the other enclosures for live snacks-and sometimes visiting nearby rooms, which risks his life. There, she prides herself on keeping the glass and concrete scrupulously clean while chatting with the inhabitants, although she saves her deep conversations for Marcellus. She fills her days with visits with her longtime friends, a group of gently eccentric women who call themselves the Knit-Wits, and fills her nights cleaning at the aquarium.

Erik was an 18-year-old golden boy when he vanished, and the police, although they found no body, believe he killed himself. But the unsealable wound is the disappearance 30 years ago of her only child. Her estranged brother has just died, with no reconciliation between them, and her beloved husband died a couple of years before from cancer. At age 70, she’s stoic but lives with layers of grief. Tova, too, has lived in the town for most of her life, in a house built by her father. What he can’t do is escape from captivity in a small public aquarium in the fictional town of Sowell Bay, near Puget Sound. A giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, to be precise, and he is that-the novel opens with the first of several short chapters narrated in the first person (unlike the rest of the book) by the octopus himself, who can, as he points out, do many things we don’t know he can do.

Tova Sullivan’s best friend is an octopus. A lonely woman discovers that sometimes humans don’t have all the answers.

Remarkable creatures book