Why You'll Love This
An octopus narrating chapters of a mystery novel sounds like a gimmick — it isn't.
- Great if you want: quiet grief, unlikely friendship, and a gentle mystery
- The experience: warm and unhurried — cozy but with real emotional weight
- The writing: Van Pelt's octopus POV is wry and surprisingly convincing
- Skip if: you want plot-driven tension over character and mood
About This Book
Some griefs settle in and stay — and for Tova Sullivan, grief has been her quiet companion for decades. Working the night shift at a small Pacific Northwest aquarium, mopping floors long after the crowds have gone, she carries the weight of a husband lost and a son who vanished from a boat thirty years ago without explanation. Then she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus with an unsettling intelligence and a deep reluctance to suffer fools. What unfolds between them is tender, strange, and unexpectedly suspenseful — a story about what it means to keep going when the thing you most need to know may be unknowable.
Shelby Van Pelt structures the novel across alternating perspectives — Tova's measured, quietly aching voice alongside Marcellus's imperious, surprisingly funny interior monologue — and the contrast is where the book earns its real distinction. Giving an octopus a genuine point of view is a risk that could easily tip into gimmick, but Van Pelt earns every page of it. The prose is clean and emotionally precise, and the pacing rewards patience. This is a novel that understands how loss accumulates slowly and how, occasionally, truth arrives from the most improbable direction.