Remarkably Bright Creatures (book and movie)

Screenshot of RBC book cover

SPOILERS GALORE! BEWARE!

I’m surprised that I didn’t love this book because in general I enjoy books about animals. It wasn’t really about animals though; it was about people. The sections narrated by Marcellus the octopus were much briefer than the rest of the chapters, which was a bummer. He had a wonderful droll, sarcastic voice, and it would have been great to spend more time in his POV. Instead, we are rapidly introduced to a whole bunch of humans, and I had a hard time keeping track ~ by page 35, we had 18 characters and that number kept growing. It was so tedious to read the backstories of all these folks. Why do I care about Tova's "Knit-Wit" friends when I barely have been introduced to Tova, the main character? And then a random 30 year old grungy musician (Cameron) is flung at us, along with his aunt, her boyfriend, bandmates, etc. Huh? I know Cameron will tie into the MC's storyline later, but there was so much unnecessary detail about the side characters early in the book. Many authors make this mistake. Well, I think it's a mistake. In The Correspondent, another overrated book (imo), the same thing happened.

Moving on. I began to get the feeling from the cryptic clues that Tova's son Erik was murdered due to some drug smuggling type of incident or whatever. I thought that Marcellus was going to help solve the crime in an interesting way. Marcellus did solve a mystery, but it had nothing to do with a crime ~ Erik died in exactly the way the police said he did. That was a letdown after the buildup. What Marcellus did was make it blindingly obvious that Cameron was Tova's grandson. Cameron's mom had bequeathed him his father's high school class ring, which had ERIK'S INITIALS on it the whole time, but Cameron chased down some other elusive friend of his mother's instead. That all was effing ridiculous, and a few times I almost abandoned the book altogether.

Then there were the totally cringe romances happening. One was Cameron's awkward courtship of a local prickly single mom; the other was the gossipy grocer's pursuit of Tova. Gah. The entire Pacific NW town was full of weird, socially inept people, which made me long for more narration from the octopus. I ended up giving the book three stars, which was generous, because I loved Marcellus and cried at the end.

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I didn't have high hopes for the RBC movie on Netflix after (finally) finishing the book, but the movie was better than the book! Usually it's the other way around for me. The movie smartly streamlined the story to focus on Nova, Cameron, and Marcellus. We didn't have to wade through intros to all the other people in their lives. The romances were much less awkward too. We still didn't get enough narration from Marcellus, but on the other hand, we got a lot less tedious gobble about the ring, Cam's search for the friend who wasn't actually his dad, the smitten grocer, blah blah blah. When Cam's mom died, she left him her gross van full of junk, which included the class ring, and as soon as Cam figured out that his father was in the PNW, he hightailed it up there. In the book, we had to go through this nonsense of his aunt lending him money and giving him a box of crap to sort through, his purchase of the cruddy old van, his relationship with the band members, etc. It was all so BORING! I wasn't at all bored during the movie. The plot actually made more sense in the film version, and we weren't given any misdirection about Erik's death. The ending was super lovely too. I'd give the movie 4 stars.

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I began a couple of June challenges. One is a reading challenge via my online book club. I know I said I wasn't going to do those anymore because I end up reading crummy books just to fulfill a category, but I am doing it anyway. My plan is to review the books here on my blog, but we'll see if that happens. My original plan for this blog was to post mostly book and movie reviews and avoid meaningless prompts, but I ended up doing some prompts too. What can I say ~ I enjoy them.

The other challenge is Leslie Sansone's get fit in 30 days video. It's not that strenuous, so I think I can do all the things without hurting myself. (I hope.) I did the first 30 minute aerobic session tonight, which seemed fine, vigorous, but not overwhelming. I did just take some ibuprofen though. Three times per week we do that, and three times per week we do some kind of stretching session. I guess we have Sundays off.

Inky is doing great on her plan and clocked in at 9.9 pounds today. Yay! If we could get down to 9.5, that would be even better. The vet should be pleased when we go for our September checkup.