Sweet and clever. Looking forward to the screen adaptation.

Suspend your disbelief & enjoy a lovely tale. Well written & by the end tied all together neatly with an octopus’s twine. Shelby - please write us some more lovely tales.

Endearing story of how an octopus and an older woman help each other. Friends become family and letting go can lead you to better things .

What a pleasant surprise! I wasn’t sure about this book. I had it in my TBR for a while and I finally broke down and bought it thinking I would enjoy it. I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT. What a wonderful story. I looked forward to getting to my friends in my book everyday. I will remember this book forever!

In this book, you can easily guess the answer to the “mystery”, but then to make that worse, midway through the book, the mystery is actually directly answered for the reader - but not the characters - and so you spend the book wishing the characters would make better choices to lead them to an inevitable and obvious end. It’s a sweet and easy story to read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my friends for a “good read”.

I really wanted to love this book after reading the reviews but I found it so boring and confusing to keep track of all the characters that never developed into anything. Not sure I read the same book as all the people who loved it.

Great read! A lovely mystery-esque novel that explores grief and loss in a relatable, humorous way. Characters were life like. Very well written!

This starts off a little bit slow but it would be hard to not love this book by the end of it. Van Pelt does a great job at creating a small-town setting and raising interesting, character-specific questions throughout it, and then answering them in extremely satisfying (and sweet) ways by the end. There’s not much of a memorable writing style to this, but the cleverness, and overall warmness of the book is strong enough to make this a 4.5/5. Absolutely worth a read for anyone looking for an easy-to-read and wholesome story.

I don’t give five stars easily, but this book definitely deserves it. Prepared to be enchanted and moved. I loved all the characters. My favorite? Marcellus, of course.

Blew me away and transported me to a previous time in my life. This author is transcendental in her story organization. Superbly written and I cannot wait for the next one.