Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

Good on you, everyone reading Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures! You've made a bestseller out of a basically good-hearted, basically wholesome book, and that's a very good thing.

Is the resolution telegraphed well over a hundred pages before book's end? Sure.

Is Marcellus the remarkably bright octopus maybe a convenient device to obscure a plot that relies too heavily on coincidence? Sure.

Is the "journal entry" method of capturing Marcellus' narration unduly improbable even for an imagined octopus capable of reading, analyzing human gait patterns, etc etc? Again, sure (but for the record, I was fine with all of Marcellus' other improbable and/or impossible abilities).

And so for me, this wasn't a book I appreciated as much as I wish I had. 

I'm often a really emotional reader, especially when I'm stressed right before the beginning of a semester (ie, now), though more so with video than text, but somehow this one didn't hit. I wanted to keep reading, and that's something, but I couldn't read fast enough. Once the ending was telegraphed, all I really wanted to do was get through how the plot would tie up, and I came away kind of annoyed that I had to read this many pages.

And it's not that I don't like long books, because I've said before that for the right book, I'd read hundreds more pages than the author had given me on the page.

As I say, it's great that a good-hearted, wholesome book has become a bestseller. It just wasn't the right book for me, at least not right now.