THE BLUE LOBSTER: A Life Cycle

Blue lobsters do turn up in nature and this one fits nicely with Carrick's underwater color scheme. Similarly, she gets a personalized treatment that suits the poetic mood of the text without really anthropomorphizing. Still we aren't particularly attuned to empathizing with the lobster who is tantalized by smells coming from a baited trap and later left cringing after a fight with a larger lobster. Paragraphs of straight fact are interspersed with the experiences of this particular ""she"" so that one learns the basics of the lobster life cycle (but not words like larva) along the way to her crusty, bejeweled-with-barnacles, old age. But the ratio of packaging to meat also makes this something of a luxury item.