BookBrowse Reviews Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen

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Across generations the bones of a long dead sea cow change hands over and over, telling a story of the brutal cost of human arrogance and greed on the natural world.

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Humans did not instinctively understand the concept of extinction. We needed to learn that the buried bones we discovered belonged to creatures long since gone. That no matter how much of the world we uncovered, a saber-toothed tiger or dinosaur would never again lurk in some hidden jungle. And even once we understood that it was possible for entire species to die out, it was another thing entirely for us to come to terms with the idea that human beings themselves could be the driving force behind that extinction.

In her brutal and beautiful debut novel, Iida Turpeinen perfectly blends historical fact and fiction, taking readers on a bleak trek through time to observe the devastating effect human beings have had on the world almost from the moment of their arrival. Her chosen time machine? The bones of a long-extinct sea mammal known as Stellar's Sea Cow. Its strange, sad journey becomes a metaphor for the barbaric way humanity has for generations used and abused the natural world, wiping out entire species in a misguided belief that no matter how much they took there would always be more.

The gentle creature, "a confused potato with a fish's tail," is shot and killed, skinned, its organs removed, its bones separated, measured, and catalogued, and over several hundred years it travels the world, taken apart and put back together. It becomes a symbol of a mythical time of plenty and natural untouched beauty destroyed by greed and gluttony.

Its skeleton passes through many hands. The naturalist, shipwrecked on a barren deserted island, ends its life in the hopes of earning fame and glory. The governor of Russian Alaska offers a reward for its retrieval to try and dazzle his superiors with its discovery. The scientific illustrator captures its grandeur through drawings that will be seen by thousands of people. Finally it finds its resting place with a young man who makes his living restoring the eggs of extinct birds but turns his talents to repairing the sea cow's broken bones and finding a home for them in the Natural History Museum of Helsinki.

Turpeinen (in an English translation by David Hackston) reserves a cold, staccato writing style for the people who inhabit this world. Short, declarative phrases describe the barren island where the sea cow is first discovered. She describes the ignorance of the shipwrecked sailors, who lumber about like greedy small children, grabbing everything they see and brutally, mindlessly devouring the sea cow: "they savor it, swallow it so hungrily that they almost dislocate their jaws, they tear at it, cut and bite it, devour the sea cow with tears running down their cheeks, swallow its loin, its liver, its kidneys, its flanks and tongue, they drink its warm intoxicating blood, they eat so much it hurts, but they do not complain." Always, Turpeinen laments, humans possess an instinct toward destruction, bending nature to serve them no matter the cost.

The governor's Alaskan castle is described as reeking of stale opulence. Its residents are lonely, bitter people who see the world only in terms of what it can give. In one especially horrifying moment, the passengers on a ship bound for Alaska throw their dirty clothes overboard instead of expending the labor to clean them, since new ones can always be bought. Even though the scientific illustrator understands at last the implications of extinction and is supposedly bent on the preservation of natural life, his working space is filled with spiders carefully killed and preserved once they have been drawn, with plants plucked from the earth and crushed between sheets of paper for future generations to study.

Lush descriptions and poetic metaphors are reserved for the natural world. Throughout, dizzyingly vivid interludes describe the very beginnings of the world, cells dividing and recombining, the birth of humans and animals, even the precise moment when humans and sea cows branched out on their separate evolutionary journeys. Gradually the interludes expand to examine the destructive scope of human influence on that perfectly balanced, beautiful system. Even extinction itself is described in terms that could almost be called rhapsodic: "In English and French, a species is extinguished, life dwindles, smoulders and is eventually snuffed out, while in Swedish a species in pulled up by the roots, eradicated from the earth like weeds from a garden, but the Finnish 'sukupuutto' does not mean the death of all individuals. In Finnish even the last sea cow floating in the water has experienced 'sukupuutto,' the lack of a mate."

Turpeinen forces the reader to acknowledge extinction as more than scientific terminology. She wrestles throughout with humanity's inability to see itself as anything but the most superior lifeform on earth. It's that arrogance that fuels both the selfishness with which we treat the world and our refusal to acknowledge the damage that we do. To these characters, the desires of now are always more important than the needs of the future.

Only the preservationist who rebuilds the sea cow's skeleton offers any hope in this seemingly endless string of tragedies. As he works to preserve the sea cow, he has also been engaged in a struggle to protect the wildlife on the small island where he grew up. Just as he finishes work on the sea cow, he receives word that the island will now become a national reserve, the birds and fish and animals protected forever. It is a tiny stone thrown into a great sea, but still a victory.

Even with its somber subject matter, Beasts of the Sea is a propulsive read that dazzles as much as it depresses. There is a finality to Turpeinen's tone that still somehow conveys a sense of hope, however small. This historical devastation is not something we can fix. But like the preservationist's efforts to save his island, even small actions matter on a path toward a brighter future.

This review first ran in the January 14, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.