The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight
Published by Pamela Dorman Books
Publication date: January 07, 2025
Genres: Debut, Fiction, Coming-of-age, Literary

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Monday I shared a literary novel I loved and now I’m back with another. The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is the witty, contemporary story of two friends and their freshman year at the University of Edinburgh. Alice and Penelope both have their reasons for wanting to leave Canada and go to this particular school. Alice’s is practical in that she hopes it will be the gateway to her acting career on the stage. Pen’s motivation is a little more amorphous, centering around what she believes to be the mystery surrounding the disintegration of her family and her parents’ acrimonious divorce.

When she was a teenager, Pen’s parents went from being warm and loving to cold and distant. Divorce ensued and she’s spent the last five years staying with either her father or her mother and with both refusing any interaction with the other. Pen is certain it has something to do with her father‘s college roommate, Lord Elliot Lennox, now a famous British crime novelist. Namely, because her middle name is Elliot and her father has deliberately avoided explaining why she was given the name as well. She’s certain that if she can meet Lord Lennox, she can get him to reveal what it is about her father or their relationship that broke up her parents’ marriage.

Early on in The Life Cycle Pen does finagle an invitation to the Lennox’s ancient estate and is soon swept up in the extended family’s life, finding herself drawn to and embraced by their warmth. But no answers follow nor does anyone behave in a way that would suggest unresolved drama. Instead, she finds herself attracted to the Lennox son, Sasha, a situation that tests the limits of her comfortability interacting with the opposite sex.

Despite Pen’s theories there is no grand resolution to a calamitous mystery in The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus. It’s a quiet stream of a novel moving steadily through the exciting moments when who you were in high school is falling away to reveal a new persona. Pen and Alice follow where the currents lead them but for each it’s a different experience as Alice revels in the spotlight while Pen is uncomfortable anywhere near the stage.

This was one of the most fundamental differences between them, Alice thought: Pen had been trained to breathe less air than everyone else whereas Alice had never once in her life felt the need to apologize for taking up space.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is less about events and more about how two young women are evolving and growing in their first year away from home; their first year towards reaching their future lives. Author Emma Knight’s writing is composed and elegant, seasoned with humor and thought out in a way that evokes forgotten memories. This is a captivating story about child/parent relationships, new and old friendships, testing boundaries, and the staggering terror and excitement of the future. The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus is a beautifully executed novel that gave me many happy hours of reading.

 

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