The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

 genre: contemporary fiction

Pen's choice to leave Canada and attend the University of Edinburgh was not made lightly.  Not only is it where her father attended college, but it is where he befriended the famous novelist Lord Lennox, who still lives nearby.  Pen knows that something happened with Lord Lennox, something her dad won't talk about, and she is determined to figure out if it has anything to do with the way that her family fell apart.  This family mystery is at the heart of this coming-of-age novel.  Pen's relationship with her friends (both new and old), the boys she meets, the chances she takes - all of these are wrapped up in this mystery that has ahold of her.  She is a complex character, both cerebral and gutsy when it counts, and she is set on figuring out if Scotland has the answers that she needs.

This was a quick read for me - partly because I had the time but partly because I found myself sincerely interested in Pen her questions.  The family of Lord Lennox is intriguing and, as an American, the discussion of class and Canada vs. Great Britian is just interesting, like looking through a window into a different way of seeing the world, where accents and titles and castle ownership and inheritance laws are just a part of life that has to be dealt with in society.  The story of Pen's best friend and her choices was a little harder to relate to and even though I hated it, I appreciated how it fit into things.  There were also some really profound ideas here about motherhood and friendship and keeping ahold of our most important parts of ourselves while still learning and growing into new parts.  Every once and a while the third person narrative would take us into the mind of one of the other characters and although it threw me at first, I ended up loving this narrative device, letting me sneak into other tangential but important stories for some pages, because it allowed me to understand those characters better.  I think I really did like this book a lot, the more I think about it.   I am going to wrap this up with one of my favorite quotes: 

She and Pen had been friends since well before they had discovered the need to construct an outer shell, like that of an invertebrate animal, to protect the soft inner substance of the self.  Childhood friendships often lose their hold at that point, when one sees that the person one loved has learned to disguise herself and will no longer be reachable, or at least not often.  What made Alice feel certain...that this friendship could take them through every stage of their lives, cushioning them against the bone-crushing loneliness of being human, was that they did not have to pretend with each other.