Octopuses and Accuracy
Terry Odell

First, for those of you who are interested in my recaps of my recent trip to Norway, the Shetland Islands, Faroe Islands, Iceland, Svalbard and more, I’ve been posting them on my personal blog, Terry’s Place. I’ve also been working on my gallery. Lastly, I did an interview about expedition cruising with the travel agency that arranged our trip. You can watch the replay here. The cruise part starts about 5 minutes in.

Next, the new computer setup went relatively smoothly. Wiping the old computer was more troublesome, but as of now, I consider myself back in business.

Okay, enough personal stuff. Today’s TKZ topic: Accuracy. I’m not talking about the stretches of truth we often make for the sake of the story. Readers suspend disbelief to an extent when they read fiction, but we don’t want to make glaring errors. Their willingness to suspend goes only so far.

I belong to a local book club, and most of the time the books they choose aren’t my standard reading fare, but I’m willing to read and attend meetings when I can. Yes, there is wine involved.

A recent book choice was Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I usually get my book club books from the library, and this one arrived too late to read in time for the meeting, so I missed the discussion. I’m not doing a book review here. It’s a popular book, and I found it engaging enough. It was written in present tense, which I don’t care for. It was on the predictable side, but the main protagonist—the human one, Tova—was interesting, and easy to care about. I was happy to keep reading to see how the author brought everything together. The non-human POV character was a Giant Pacific Octopus, Marcellus, captive in a small town aquarium. The two of them, as expected, became “friends.”

As the title indicates, Marcellus was a very intelligent octopus. A bit more intelligent than science studies would indicate, but I was willing to suspend some disbelief for the sake of the story. The author took behaviors that have been observed in some octopuses and kicked them up a notch. Or three.

What I couldn’t get past, and the reason for this post today, was that Marcellus was described as having one eye. Octopuses have two eyes. And yes, I looked it up to make sure I hadn’t missed out on a piece of octopus anatomy. Now, this species is very large, and it’s possible that Tova would see only one at a time. Or maybe he’d been injured prior to his rescue. I guess the author thought a rescue octopus would be better than having the animal captured for the sake of a unique display exhibit, but that’s not the issue. Nowhere in the book was there an explanation of the single eye. So every time there was a reference to his “eye” I was yanked—forcibly—out of the story.

Stretching the behaviors I could buy, but why mess with reality? All it would have taken would have been a credible reason for only one eye. It was obvious the author had done her homework based on the behaviors she described, but it’s not like she would have missed how many eyes the creatures have. They have nine brains and three hearts, which she got right, but they have two eyes. Did he always have his head turned so only one was visible? Why make it seem that he has only one?

At the end of the book, we see a new statue outside the aquarium, and the author points out the two eyes on the statue. But nothing I saw—and nothing in any of the reviews I skimmed through—seemed to care that Marcellus wasn’t described anatomically correctly. I asked my book club members, and none of them remembered anything about the eye/eyes jumping out at them, so maybe it’s just me. One said she noticed it, but shrugged it off and kept reading. It bothered me enough to pose the question to you.

When facts are presented, and you know they’re wrong—perhaps the old safety on the Glock mistake, or smelling cordite—what’s your take? I’m not talking about a one-off mention. The mention of Marcellus staring at her with his one eye is repeated numerous times in the book.

Or, has someone here read the book and can tell me there was a mention of it, slipped in somewhere and I missed it? Maybe at the bottom of page 127 when I sneezed?

Have you ever been dinged for something a reader said was wrong when you had it right?

Have you been pulled out of a story due to inaccuracies? How glaring do they have to be before you put down the book?

*Note: The word octopus comes from the Greek, not the Latin, so the plural is octopuses, not octopi. For my science nerd friends, you can learn more about the Giant Pacific Octopus here.

Available Now
Deadly Relations.
Nothing Ever Happens in Mapleton … Until it Does
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton, Colorado’s Police Chief, is called away from a quiet Sunday with his wife to an emergency situation at the home he’s planning to sell. A man has chained himself to the front porch, threatening to set off an explosive.

Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”