Mothers, misgivings — and a manatee

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This article was published 03/06/2023 (863 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pebble & Dove is a story built around the generational relationships of women and the choices they make in attempting to right the wrongs of their mothers. —

Canadian author Amy Jones’ third novel is told from the perspective of multiple characters, a narrative structure she also employed effectively in her 2016 debut We’re All In This Together and sophomore effort Every Little Piece of Me.

As in her earlier novels, Jones shows a particular mastery for setting a scene, bringing a Florida trailer park for retirees so vividly to life that the reader can feel the humidity, hear the cicadas and see the “chain restaurants and gun shops and laser-hair removal clinics… condo towers rising up between scrubs of palmettos, huge pines dripping with Spanish moss, vultures perched in their upper branches.”

Much of the action in the novel quirkily takes place in the Florida Keys aboard a 19th-century sailing ship turned into a tourist-trap aquarium, its main attraction a manatee named Pebble. (This appears to be loosely based on the real-life Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company and its manatee Snooty who, like Pebble, was born on a sailing ship converted into an aquarium in the 1930s and lived decades in captivity.)

The book is told mainly from the perspectives of three generations of women and a few supporting characters — including, suprisingly, the manatee.

Jeanette gave up her singing career when her children were born, her career “reduced to nothing but faint memories that fuelled her bitterness, her resentment,” which is felt deeply by Imogen, her daughter.

Imogen, determined not to repeat the mistakes of her mother, leans intensely into her photography career, becoming a nomadic, world-famous photographer. But her success comes at the expense of her relationship with her daughter, Lauren, who spends most of her childhood longing for her mother’s attention.

Lauren, determined not to repeat the mistakes of her mother, aspires to perfection in marriage and motherhood, but her life is spiralling out of control: she’s estranged from her mother, her husband wants a divorce and she owes “an embarrassing amount of money” to a multilevel marketing scheme.

She clings to her daughter Dove, with perhaps predictable results: Dove feels both lonely and smothered. Expelled from school after an amazing act of retribution against bullies involving a swarm of bees, Dove pushes her mother away, worried she will “succumb to the mediocrity of life… just like Mom.”

Interspersed with the women’s stories are sections told from the point of view of Ray, Pebble’s caregiver at the aquarium. Ray reflects to his dying wife Rayna on the life they shared; the couple struggled with the same inability to communicate as the women but with an inverse problem: infertility.

The book’s setting is intensely modern, with TikTok-style social media virality playing a major role and references to cringeworthy self-help books. (Lauren ascribes to the philosophy of Putting Your Best Foot Forward, which categorizes people into types of shoes: “Lauren was an open-toe cork-soled wedge, although she was striving to be more of a black leather low-heel pump.” )

Jones’ complex female protagonists and the relationships between them are refreshingly believable. Even the nosy battle-axe neighbour, in the end, is revealed to have a backstory that makes her more than a cardboard cut-out of a villain. But as in her previous books, a flaw is the missing motivations of a chief player, in this case Lauren’s husband, whose typoed request for a divorce sparks the book’s momentum.

In Jones’ sure hands, overlapping and contradictory viewpoints are treated sensitively and with humour. Pebble & Dove is a perceptive examination of generational miscues and a meditation on captivity in both animal and human relationships.

Wendy Sawatzky is associate editor of digital news for the Free Press. She considers “you’re just like your mother” to be a compliment.