You might say that this is a historical novel about two pioneer women hunting for fossils on the famed beach of Lyme, one of them being paleontology legend Mary Anning and the other being the less famous fossil hunter and collector Elizabeth Philpot.
You’d be wrong, for this is a book about change.
When the story opens, Elizabeth defines herself as a spinster, aged 22, and has the habit of classifying people at a glance by their most prominent facial feature: the eyes, the eyebrows, the lips, herself being a woman who “leads with her jaw” for her habit of clenching her teeth. She blames this feature of hers as the reason she’s a spinster, for a man once remarked he was afraid of cutting himself on her face.
When the story opens, Mary thinks she’s finding weird stone crocodiles, and the whole world with her, for the concept of extinction would be too terrifying to contemplate for a society that still reads the Bible literally. Ammonites are snake-stones, and you can’t talk about them never having a snake’s head. Belemnites are devil’s fingers, and you’re left wondering at how many toenails the Devil might possess to shed so many. You can’t even whisper that these might be animals that don’t exist anymore. After all, what would that say about God? If He’s able to abandon a water crocodile to its fate, might He do the same with us?
Through the story, we follow Mary growing up, and Elizabeth growing old, and the view of the world changes. Geologists and naturalists come to classify Mary’s monsters as an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaurus. Mary herself, who voices half of the chapters in the book, grows from talking about verteberries to counting and classifying vertebrae, and by the end of the book she’s able to spot at a glance which subspecie of plesiosaurus she’s looking at, by Latin name. And Elizabeth, a woman who’s always led with her jaw… well, I’ll let you read it by yourself.
You’ll be danced through these changes with grace and Chevalier’s impeccable prose, alternating chapters by Mary’s evolving voice with chapters by Elizabeth’s more mature and steady voice.
And, if you’re anything like me and wanted to be a paleontologist as a child, you’ll want to grab a shawl, go trampling on a muddy beach and change the view people have of the world. One beautiful stone at a time.
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