Queen Anne Books

I’ve jokingly called this book Jane Austen with fossils and, although it’s not exactly accurate, it is a good place to start. Chevalier’s (author of The Girl with the Pearl Earring) latest book follows the lives of two real women who were central to the early days of dinosaur fossil discovery - Mary Anning, a working-class girl with a gift for sighting fossils, and Elizabeth Philpot, a wealthy, self-taught spinster who studied ancient fish fossils. Though they came from different classes, they both lived in the small English town of Lyme Regis in the years just after Austen’s books (there is even a sly reference to her). They became close over the discovery of some of the first full dinosaur skeletons.
I found this book completely fascinating both in the details about fossil discovery and in how it started to change these women’s lives and the world in general. I had never thought of how radical even the idea of a single species having gone extinct would have been, let alone hundreds of species.  The only thing I wished for was that the main character’s lives would be more like Jane Austen characters. This would make a great book club selection.  ~Lillian