I READ THIS because (a) several friends liked it and (b) it was tipped in the acknowledgements of Brenda Shaughnessy's recent book. It's a swift and enlightening read, but I would dissent from the reviewer (quoted on the back of the paperback) who likened it to Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk. Macdonald's book often speaks to loss, frustration, need, fear, but Montgomery seems content to stay in better-lit, more familiar emotional territory.
Lots of amazing information about octopuses (octopodes?) here--their intelligence, their astonishing facility at expanding and contracting, their ability to change color and create camouflage. I had not known much of this, and Montgomery lays it out deftly.
The book often gets just chatty, though, in a way I did not enjoy. Montgomery spends quite a bit of space on her interactions with the staff and volunteers at the Boston Aquarium, where most of the book is set, but we do not ever find out very much about any one of them, so I found myself wishing I either hearing more about them or a lot less.
Similarly, Montgomery tells us a lot about some difficulties she had learning to scuba dive. Something could have been done with this, รก la Macdonald, but then she gets the hang of things and dives...and I'm left to wonder, what was all that bother for? Did it need three pages?
I could have used a lot more like this:
But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don't experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth's vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depths, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.
A brilliant passage, no? Wouldn't you like to hear more about that? No such luck. Next sentence: "A half hour later, when my friends emerge, my ears are no better." Really, that's what you want to tell us about? Your ears?
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