Creatures -

Crissy Van Meter

Algonquin Books

2020

256 páginas

8h 32m

ISBN-10: 1616208597

This mesmerizing debut novel opens on the eve of Evangeline's wedding, when her long-absent mother returns. From there, the novel unfolds both forward and backward in time to probe the complexities and contradictions of her family and, by extension, her life. Evie's home is the fictional Winter Island off the coast of Los Angeles, where few live year-round; she feels bound to this lush and wild place forever. After her mother leaves, Evie grows up with her father, bouncing around a community of wealthy tourists and poor fishermen, surviving off the money he makes dealing the island's world-famous weed, Winter Wonderland. Together, they have a deep respect for the elements and the sea and the creatures that live within it; alone, Evie must figure out how to parent herself and learn to love unconditionally.

In Creatures, Crissy Van Meter crafts a clear-eyed portrait of Evangeline's life, in which love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief and redemption are inevitable, and all of which she must confront in order to learn to love unconditionally. Lyrical, modern, darkly funny, ultimately cathartic, Creatures exerts a pull as strong as the tides that Evie and her father live by.