Dec 14

Dec 14 Creatures

Author: Crissy Van Meter
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor of Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, Evie remembers and reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California.

Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of marijuana, Winter Wonderland. Although he raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing ashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and the ways in which our ability to love can be threatened if we are not brave enough to conquer the past.

Lyrical, darkly funny, and ultimately cathartic, Creatures exerts a pull as strong as the tides.

TL;DR Review

Creatures is a beautiful, immersive little book, with prose that begs to be underlined and a main character who aches off the page.

For you if: You love character-driven novels with gorgeous writing.

Full Review

“So your father will spend years telling you that when he’s gone, he’ll always be right there with you — except how can you know what that means? He’s been letting you run around a beach without any sunscreen, with no hat; he’s lost your shoes. How can you know what it’s like to lose the people you love when you are still trying to figure out how to love them?”

Creatures was hand-picked for me by the lovely booksellers who fulfill Page 1 Book subscriptions, and they nailed it (as always). This book is short, beautiful, and immersive, stuffed with passages that beg to be underlined. I dog-eared no less than eight passages (in a book under 250 pages) for potential “sums up why I loved it” inclusion in this review.

It starts in the days before Evie’s wedding. The fishing vessel on which her fiancé, Liam, works hasn’t come back yet, and her unpredictable, not-so-mothering mother shows up unexpectedly. The book is anchored there: Thursday through Sunday of that week. But throughout the book, Evie’s narration jumps both backward and forward in time, from growing up with an imperfect, alcoholic father, to the perpetual fear that Liam will leave like everyone else, to her father’s death. She paints for us the details of a life spent learning how to trust, love, and grow.

If you prefer plot-driven books, this one isn’t for you. The way it jumps around in time and switches from past tense to present — and even the whale-fact interludes — are all in service of character and a meditation on what it means to love and be loved. And it’s so, so well done.

There are a ton of layers here, so much said and unsaid. Crissy Van Meter’s ability to say a lot with very little is incredible, especially in this debut novel. I expect I’ll be rereading this one sooner rather than later.

“Once, my mother talked about atmospheric pressure. Said there was pressure all over, even in the deepest, darkest trench. My mother didn't like this pressure, said it felt like she might explode. She closed the windows and used wooden dowels to lock them shut. I said something like, There's so much pressure that your heart can explode.
When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.”