The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

“Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her.”

She’s pretty sure it has to do with her dad’s university friend, Lord Lennox, a bestselling crime writer who lives with his family on his centuries-old estate. Brazenly (and she’s not, by nature, a brazen person) Pen writes him a note, to which he responds with an invitation—

Thus begins Emma Knight’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, a delicious coming-of-age story that’s deepened and complicated by Pen’s determination to solve the mystery of her parents’ past.

Pen (Penelope, really) comes to Edinburgh with her best friend Alice, an aspiring actor who is a brazen person, and they’re soon drawn into the circle of their new mutual friend Jo.

Visiting the Lennox family a few weeks into the term, she’s welcomed with open arms by Lord Lennox, his wife Christina, niece George and eldest son Sasha, for whom she feels an instant, alarming attraction.

Pen’s life on campus involves predictable tensions: studying (but avoiding the temptation to spend all her time studying), finding a new balance in her friendship with Alice, maybe but not quite falling in love, new pleasures and disappointments.

Plus, she has to adjust to a new country— the different meanings of words, what’s funny and what’s not.

Though the story ultimately belongs to Pen, Knight moves in and out of a variety of characters’ points of view, each one in some way illuminating her experience.

Hints to the mystery of Pen’s family are dropped brilliantly throughout, coalescing when the solution appeared—at which point I simultaneously thought, OMG/Of course.

I couldn’t have enjoyed this book more unless I’d been lucky enough to be reading it on the beach.

If you’ve got a beach vacation coming up, read it there and think of me.

You might give this one a try, too—