Dream-like and lyrical, Creatures by debut author Crissy Van Meter is a story that ebbs and flows like the tide—delicate, inevitable, and mesmerising.
On the eve of Evie’s wedding, a storm has washed a dead whale into the harbour of Winter Island, a fictional and feral island off the Southern Californian coast. While her fiancé may be lost at sea, the storm has brought home Evie’s long-wandering mother. This pivotal moment serves as the starting point for a story that weaves through past, present, and future, pulling the reader along effortlessly as we traverse Evie’s lifeline. We learn that she was raised a child of the island, a creature perhaps of circumstance rather than upbringing while her father peddled drugs to tourists on the island, and we watch as Evie struggles at every turn to reconcile the lush wildness of the island that is her home—and in all its glorious complexities—the lush wildness that is herself. In the end, the journey of the tale is as wholly beautiful and provocative as any single moment, making Van Meter’s debut a powerful exploration of the complexities of human emotion and the lengths a heart will go to in order to love.
Written to mimic the tidal charts she studies, Evie’s story is told through alternating timelines that some readers may find confusing, but is not without merit; this disorientation is a requisite component of the story and skilfully and intentionally written. Reading Creatures is sort of like floating underwater, where we lose sense of what is now and real and find ourselves immersed in a world that is boundless and fluid, but no less deadly. This intersection of fact and fiction is rather like life itself, where boundaries blur and we must craft our own version of the truth from cobbled together information and experience.
A debut that is anything but ordinary, Creatures is subtle yet intentional in its symbolic connection to elements of the natural world. Still, it’s just as deliberately a story of the uniquely human condition. The cyclical nature of Evie’s journey—from child to adult, and in various degrees of wholeness between—is profound. At times heart wrenching and still darkly funny, there is poignancy even in Evie’s exposure to childhood traumas, from a neglectful mother to a toxic if well-meaning father, a best friend that is equal loyal and betraying. Like Evie, we are given the opportunity to explore concepts of grief and forgiveness, as much as for the self as for those who have wronged us.
And that’s what this reader thinks sets Creatures apart: it’s a reminder that, like Evie, we are all lush and wild creatures, beholden as much to the world around us and all its lovely juxtapositions as we are doomed to the same inevitability as the whale that washed up in the harbour of Winter Island on the eve of her wedding.
We have all known a woman like Evie’s mother. We have all known a man like Evie’s father. We’ve all had a friend like Rook. We’ve all loved someone like Liam. They are all water, moving in and out of our lives, sometimes coming, sometimes going, but always leaving their mark on our hearts.
In the end, though we may not yet realise it, we’ve all been Evie and her whale. We have all been ravaged by the water. We tumble, we float, we drown, and we resurface.
Creatures is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of January 9th 2020.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
