He hasn’t done much with his life till now, is unable to hold a steady job and has been recently dumped by his girlfriend who was fed up with his lack of initiative and whimsical nature. The setting of Puget sound is described in all of it’s splendor, I could easily picture the glistening blue waters and almost smell the salt in the air! She had an uncanny gift for finding fossils, was the origin of the tongue-twister "She Sells Sea Shells on the Sea Shore", and in 1811 when she was 12 (Darwin was two) her first big find, a "crocodile" later named ichthyosaurus, rocked the scientific world. On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: “the eye” to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see.

Although Tova and I had age and a fear of freeways in common, I did not identify with her need to clean. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. Mary is more than reluctant—the task of collecting fossils is an arduous one, and she’s content in her solitude—but the Murchisons have money and Mary is barely scraping by.

Further investigation reveals that the skull is only part of a much larger discovery: a nearly complete and well-preserved ichthyosaur skeleton. I became entranced with the story of an unknown woman of poor schooling and economic standing who pursued the opportunities of a lifetime. The narrators were absolutely great and the voice of Marcellus is just as I expected it would be, he is intelligent, a bit of a grouch but has formed a bond with Tova. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she’s now missing the mountains in the Chicago area with her husband and two children. Tracy Chevalier excels at writing about the ordinary human characters who find themselves accidentally at the centre of history.

Lightning strikes the tree, killing the other three women, but Mary survives and is profoundly changed. Though Tova has a supportive group of friends, she is concerned about not having anyone to look after her in her advanced age and begins to consider the option of selling her home and moving into an upscale retirement facility.She already knew Marcellus, just as she knew all the other aquarium creatures but she never KNEW him before she and Marcellus meet face to face in an amazing way. It's just your average "intersecting destinies" story with a very predictable plot proceeding at a snail-like pace.