If you’re looking to read a book in one sitting, look no further. Creatures is a unique family drama that sucks you under like a furtive undertow. You will feel every range of emotions while turning these pages, it will leave you speechless. ( )

Disturbing and beautiful story of a girl who grows up in a hard life on an island among broken people. She doesn’t get what she needs as a child, but she somehow parents herself - not perfectly, but she ends up better than one might have predicted. ( )

Beautiful story and gorgeous writing. This will definitely be one of my favorites for awhile.

I could not get past the 1st few lines about the dead whale in the harbor. Alcoholic father, missing mother, trying to grow up in difficult circumstances......read it all before. Finally just scanned to the end to say I finished. ( )

Some readers may find Crissy Van Meter’s debut novel “magical” and “lyric”. Others may simply be annoyed at its fragmented structure and its self-indulgent characters.

The story bounces around the life of the main character, Evie. Damaged perhaps irreparably by her mother’s abandonment and her feckless father’s inconsistent parenting, Evie has difficulty seeing herself as someone of worth, and – not surprisingly – has problems forming meaningful relationships with others. In the opening chapter, it’s the eve of her wedding, her commercial-fisherman fiancée’s boat has not yet returned to port, her peripatetic mother has popped in uninvited, and there is a large, dead, and increasingly smelly whale stranded at the harbor entry of the small California Channel island where she lives. It takes a rather long time to circle back around to the conclusion of this stressful episode, and the path wanders back and forth through Evie’s life (including the decades-later rough patch in her marriage, which sort of takes out the suspense of whether or not Liam is going to show up for the nuptials).

Evie is an engaging character, and her struggles to grow up despite an unconventional, often deprived, upbringing form the heart of the novel. Her love-hate relationship with the tiny island where she lives echoes her love-hate relationship with her parents, her early sex partners, and even her best friend whose ultimate betrayal seems for a while to be a gulf she cannot cross. The island itself and particularly the whales and other sea mammals she studies are beautifully described and are themselves additional characters in the tale.

But there really doesn’t seem to be any particular reason to depart from a straight chronological telling, which is annoying at least and confusing at worst. The real weakness, at last for this reviewer, was the constant thread of drug and alcohol abuse by all the characters. How often can one ask the reader to witness beer & bong parties, characters throwing up, skull-busting hangovers, and random sexual encounters, all laced liberally with F-bombs apparently inserted every paragraph or so to give verisimilitude to the dialogue.

“Creatures” is a slim book, so reading it doesn’t represent a great investment of time. But it’s so in love with itself, with the meta structure and metaphorical reach of an undeniably talented but somewhat undisciplined writer, that the whole thing just feels self-indulgent.

Four stars for the quality of the story; three for presentation. ( )