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by Lindsay Hatton
A beautiful debut set around the creation of the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium - and the last days of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
In 1940, fifteen year-old Margot Fiske arrives on the shores of Monterey Bay with her eccentric entrepreneur father. Margot has been her father's apprentice all over the world, until an accident in Monterey's tide pools drives them apart and plunges her head-first into the mayhem of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
Steinbeck is hiding out from his burgeoning fame at the raucous lab of Ed Ricketts, the biologist known as Doc in Cannery Row. Ricketts, a charismatic bohemian, quickly becomes the object of Margot's fascination. Despite Steinbeck's protests and her father's misgivings, she wrangles a job as Ricketts's sketch artist and begins drawing the strange and wonderful sea creatures he pulls from the waters of the bay.
Unbeknownst to Margot, her father is also working with Ricketts. He is soliciting the biologist's advice on his most ambitious and controversial project to date: the transformation of the Row's largest cannery into an aquarium. When Margot begins an affair with Ricketts, she sets in motion a chain of events that will affect not just the two of them, but the future of Monterey as well.
Alternating between past and present, Monterey Bay explores histories both imagined and actual to create an unforgettable portrait of an exceptional woman, a world-famous aquarium, and the beloved town they both call home.
"Starred Review. Along with creating a fully realized, realistic heroine seen across decades, Hatton is a writer of often exceptional prose." - Kirkus
"Fans of John Steinbeck and his Cannery Row stories will delight in this novel. She does an excellent job of recreating the Cannery Row that no longer exists, honoring the memory of Steinbeck and Ricketts (the real-life inspiration for Cannery Row's Doc) and all the workers who once toiled there, as seen through the eyes of a precocious teenage heroine." - Publishers Weekly
"Debut novelist Hatton's authoritative writing elicits strong emotions, and in this biographically shaped historical novel she brings to life the realm of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, including Steinbeck himself, Ricketts' brooding patron." - Booklist
"In limpid prose and acutely captured sensual detail, Hatton tells the story of 15-year-old Margot Fiske, who arrives at Cannery Row with her entrepreneurial father, but snarls up his plans by getting mixed up with Ricketts - first as his sketch artist, then as his lover." - Huffington Post's Summer 2016 Books You Won't Want to Miss
"Like Euphoria and The Signature of All Things, Monterey Bay is about passion - for ideas as well as lovers - that soaks in so deeply you can't ever wash it away. By the novel's end, I was in love with Ed Ricketts and feisty Margot Fiske myself - and with Monterey Bay too, which Lindsay Hatton brings to life with phenomenal skill." - Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
"Monterey Bay is expert on the obsessive intensities of loneliness and neglect, and the way passion can grow out of rage at one's self and situation, but where it really takes flight is in its portrait of its protagonist's sensual and dispassionate engagement with the natural world as both consolation and unexpected source of power." - Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron and Like You'd Understand Anyway
"Lindsay Hatton's Monterey Bay is a tour de force of heart, history, and imagination. The novel is a love letter to the glorious Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Hatton renders its characters, human and animal alike, with nuance, originality and, above all else, rare and powerful compassion." - Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This and Corpus Christi
"A fascinating, knotted cord tethers Margot Fiske to the men in her life: not just the enthralling Ed Ricketts, but her savvy, unsentimental father and two unlikely lifelong friends. The way these characters change and shape one another, with violence, business and sometimes tenderness, is examined by Hatton with a gratifyingly light touch and a searing intelligence." - Ann Napolitano, author of A Good Hard Look
This information about Monterey Bay was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lindsay Hatton is a graduate of Williams College. She holds an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but was born and raised in Monterey, California, where she spent many fascinating and formative summers working behind the scenes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
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