The most famous character in Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel has eight arms, three hearts and a grudge against his captors. Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living out his days in a small Puget Sound aquarium, narrates chunks of "Remarkably Bright Creatures" with the weary condescension of a creature who has seen it all. "Humans," he observes, "for the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures."
On Wednesday, Oct. 21, Van Pelt comes to Mukilteo to meet the humans who have made her book a phenomenon. She appears at 6 p.m. at the Rosehill Community Center, 304 Lincoln Ave., as part of Sno-Isle Reads Together, the library system's annual community reading program. The event is free and open to the public. It is the first of three appearances in the region: she is also scheduled for Oct. 22 at 6 p.m. at the Oak Harbor Yacht Club and Oct. 28 at 6:30 p.m. online, with registration through sno-isle.org.
The setting is fitting in ways that go beyond scheduling. Rosehill sits in Old Town Mukilteo on a bluff above Possession Sound, with a wall of windows looking out over the water where Van Pelt's story begins and ends. The building itself replaced the original Rosehill school, whose first wooden schoolhouse went up in 1893, burned in 1928, and was rebuilt as a school that served Mukilteo until the 1970s before becoming a community center. After more than a decade of debate over whether to remodel or rebuild, the city opened the current 29,000-square-foot center in 2011. Its game room floor was milled from the old building's gym. A book about a place holding onto its past while making room for something new has landed in a building that did exactly that.
Sno-Isle Reads Together asks adults across Snohomish and Island counties to read the same book at the same time, then talk about it -- through book discussions, nature and marine-themed programs, and author events. Sno-Isle Libraries serves more than 800,000 residents through 23 community libraries, online services and Library on Wheels, and the program is supported by the Sno-Isle Libraries Foundation. Past selections have ranged widely, from Kira Jane Buxton's zombie-crow novel "Hollow Kingdom" to Noé Álvarez's memoir "Accordion Eulogies." This year's pick is a book about grief, friendship and an octopus, which is not the pitch most library programs get to make.
The novel follows Tova Sullivan, a 70-year-old widow who takes the night shift mopping floors at the Sowell Bay Aquarium after her husband dies. Keeping busy has always been how she copes -- she has been coping since her 18-year-old son, Erik, vanished from a boat in the Puget Sound more than 30 years earlier. Marcellus, who knows more than anyone imagines, would not dream of lifting a tentacle for his human captors until Tova becomes his friend. Then he sets out to solve the mystery of Erik's disappearance before his own short life runs out.
Van Pelt was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and now lives in the suburbs of Chicago with her family. She has said that if she could go back in time, she would have become a marine biologist -- an ambition that surfaces throughout the book, which is as much a love letter to the Salish Sea as it is a mystery. In interviews she has described starting from a simple question about what keeps her characters up at night, and said that Tova's loss of a child grew partly out of her own experience as a new mother, working through the anxiety of what the worst thing might be. Grief, she has noted, is something everyone experiences -- not only the death of someone close, but the loss of a life you thought you would have.
The book was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in the United States and Bloomsbury in the UK in spring 2022, became an instant New York Times bestseller, and has sold more than a million and a half copies. It drew praise from novelists including Jamie Ford and Kevin Wilson, the latter marveling that Van Pelt "makes good on this wild conceit, somehow making me love a misanthropic octopus."
Its reach has since extended well past the page. A Netflix adaptation directed by Olivia Newman, with a script by Newman and John Whittington, arrived on May 8, 2026. Sally Field plays Tova; Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, the young drifter Tova takes under her wing; and Alfred Molina voices Marcellus. The cast also includes Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Sofia Black-D'Elia and Colm Meaney. The film runs 111 minutes and drew strong reviews, going on to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Movie and another for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for Field.
For readers in Snohomish and Island counties, though, the draw this month is simpler: a hometown author, a book set on their own water, and a free hour in a community room to ask her how an octopus ended up with the best lines in a novel about human grief. Copies of "Remarkably Bright Creatures" are available at local libraries in print, eBook and audiobook. The Mukilteo event is one of the complementary programs Sno-Isle has built around the selection, alongside book discussions and marine and nature-themed events.
Van Pelt's octopus is a creature of the aquarium, but the species is native here -- giant Pacific octopuses are the largest octopus in the world, with adults weighing 40 to 100 pounds and stretching 12 to 14 feet tip to tip. Readers who meet Van Pelt at Rosehill can walk out to the windows afterward and look at the sound her characters mourn and search. It is the kind of coincidence a library programmer could not plan better, and the kind of thing Marcellus might have noticed: occasionally, humans do something remarkably bright.