Must we spectate other animals to recognize their existence? The author loves the octopuses so much, she spends more and more time at the aquarium, and in the process, befriends a core group of aquarium staff, volunteers, and their relatives, who all also reach in on “Wonderful Wednesdays” (as Montgomery dubs it) to touch the octopuses. Over the course of the book, the author visits with four main octopuses, named by the aquarium keepers as Athena, Octavia, Kali, and Karma. These interactions generally involve Montgomery reaching into the tanks to touch the octopuses, and in turn, letting the octopuses “taste” her with suckered tentacles. The book revolves around Montgomery visiting the Boston Aquarium, where she has a backstage pass to interact with its wild-caught resident octopuses.

This stock image likely comes at the expense of an octopus’s freedom. In fact, Sy Montgomery’s text lauds and leverages these practices in its quest to prove that octopuses are just as special as us wonderful humans. It is a book in which humans crowd in front of octopuses, both literally and figuratively, and which, in working towards its shallow goal of convincing people that animals are sentient beings, almost never grapples with the moral questions of keeping wild beings in captivity, subjecting them to questionable experiments, and intruding upon them in the wild. In other words, The Soul of an Octopus offers no revelation for a reader like me. So, so wooed by the idea of a philosophical engagement with cephalopods, I ignored the glaring “ New York Times Bestseller” warning also on the cover, and didn’t even flip to the back blurb, where I would have seen that the author is a “popular naturalist.” If I had paid more attention to such marginalia, I could have guessed that The Soul of an Octopus is geared towards a general, self-centered public that needs to be pampered and persuaded to reach the basic fact that animals are conscious, living beings - something I (naively) thought we all already realized the first time we saw a fly watching us watching “it.” I usually gravitate toward the terrestrial rather than the aquatic, and felt that this text, with its “National Book Award Finalist” stamp and undulating octopus illustration on the cover, would plunge me into the poetic nuances of these intelligent underwater beings. When I found this nonfiction nature book next to Ill Nature in the The Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, CA, I snatched it up precisely because I wanted to be schooled hard in octopuses’ magic.

Octopuses are breathtaking upon first sight, no convincing me needed.

The soul of an octopus by sy montgomery