One of the interesting things about the particular time period that this book follows, starting with the early years of Mary Anning when Elizabeth and her sisters move to Lyme going forward many years until Anning’s adult years it is a time of real historical discoveries that changed perceptions about animals and in particular extinction going against contemporary settled ideas about God and the creation of the earth.

Mary and Elizabeth challenge these assumptions by being passionate and hard-working, curious and questioning of everything they encounter. Two women exploring the male-dominated field of science, they’re not exactly welcome among the upper class learned men who believe women cannot possibly understand such complicated things as God’s creatures or their anatomies for that matter. Instead this book follows characters who are constrained by their circumstances but manage to make the most of it and push beyond them, despite having everything speaking against them. While the setting, early 1800s, reminds me of Jane Austen and the expansive fields and flowing muslin dresses of her books there’s little of the romanticism of Austen’s works in the story of Anning or her friend, Elizabeth. Mary Anning, having grown up in a worker’s family and having to collect ‘curies’ that the family could sell to make a living and feed the household is an unglamorous heroine. This book is of the quiet, ruminating sort – looking less at one specific life-changing event – although there’s a bit of that too – but it’s more a part of a life in flux in the midst of transformation. The book follow her coming into her own, figuring out what she’s good at and becoming famous for her findings falling in and out of love, making friends with a woman of higher class, Elizabeth, whose brother sent off her and her sisters to Lyme when he got married to make place for his own family. Remarkable Creatures tells the story of Mary Anning, famed fossil hunter, in a fictionalized account of her life. I’ve been on a historical fiction kick lately with titles like I was Anastasia and The Trouble with Goats and Sheep so it was only right I got to one of the masters of the genre, Tracy Chevalier.

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