Excellent novella! This was my first Ali Hazelwood, and I really enjoyed it. Ethel and Lazlo are really fun together.

I was very impressed with the expert way that Hazelwood was able to create deep characters and the lore surrounding them in such a short time frame. She builds the world, lays out all the players, and the stakes involved without making it feel like a giant lore dump or shoehorned into the text.

The interplay between the two is fun and kept me laughing throughout. It was so good that I forced myself to take my time with it and just read a chapter or two at a time, rather than have the whole thing be over in one sitting.

I did an immersion read of this, and the audiobook is also truly fantastic. Nina Yndis and Maxim Reston really bring Ethel and Lazlo to life. Nina’s performance brings both the sadness and wisdom that an immortal being who is lonely and doesn’t fully appreciate her own loneliness to life. Meanwhile, Maxim brings a sense of lightness and fun to an eternal life that would seem to most to be as lonely and depressing as Ethel’s.

Put together, the text and audio of this novella get a full-throated recommendation from me. I will definitely be adding more Ali Hazelwood to my TBR.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the story of Tova, the late-night cleaning woman at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, and Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus that is on exhibit at that same aquarium. Tova is a recently widowed woman with a tragic past, having lost her son under mysterious circumstances 30 years ago, who throws herself into her job as a coping mechanism. Marcellus is an exceptionally observant octopus who can read, understand humans, and regularly wanders the halls of the aquarium at night looking for snacks and treasures. Over the course of the story, Tova and Marcellus’s stories become further intertwined, and the reader gets to come along for the ride. Shelby Van Pelt does a wonderful job of pulling the reader into the story. The different POVs feel different from each other and are each compelling in their own right. Of particular interest are the chapters told from the perspective of the octopus that bookend many chapters. The humor on display is excellent, and the ability of these short vignettes to also move the story forward in meaningful ways is well executed. The setting of Sowell Bay feels real, and the people that populate the town give it a real depth. The story has many different threads that start out seemingly disparate but connect in unexpected ways. I genuinely found myself regularly chuckling out loud while reading this and was always ready to get in just one more chapter. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to just about anyone. This is a great book, and even more impressive for being a debut. I look forward to whatever this author releases next.