I’m a nut for all things British: Scotland, for instance, with its plaids and mists and attractive accents (think Brigadoon, Braveheart, "Outlander"). Maybe that naive vision is what drew me to Emma Knight’s THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS. This is not Knight’s first rodeo when it comes to writing --- she’s a Canadian journalist and cookbook author --- but it is her first go at fiction. A sensitive coming-of-age story combined with a handsome setting, her novel feels as fresh as daybreak on the moors.

The year is 2006. Pen, short for Penelope, is a bookish young Canadian, impeccably educated, strangely beautiful (boyish figure, pale skin, “intense green gaze”) and, in one character’s words, “assiduously unobtrusive.” With her glamorous best friend, Alice, a would-be actor, she is starting her first year at the University of Edinburgh, where her father went to school.

But why would a shy person like Pen make a choice --- “both wonderful and dangerous” --- to go so far from home? Her parents’ divorce was the tragedy of her young life, and her private mission is to discover what lay behind the “slow-motion implosion” of their marriage. Her father’s secretive behavior makes her think it had to do with an old friend, Elliot Lennox, a Scottish peer and author of a bestselling series of stylish detective fiction. (Pen’s middle name, by the way, is Lennox.)

Pen and Alice soon form a trio with Jo, an unsnobbish lass from a posh family (their stately home is called, adorably, Buttons). They eat breakfast together, dance at clubs, dress in cool thrift-shop clothing, and support one another through love affairs fair or foul. Following Alice’s fling with their philosophy teacher and its unsavory aftermath, Pen risks her own reputation to avenge her friend.

"A sensitive coming-of-age story combined with a handsome setting, [Emma Knight's] novel feels as fresh as daybreak on the moors.... [THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS is] thoroughly charming and heartfelt..."

Jo is more of a footnote to Pen and Alice’s bond, but, with her twin brother, Fergus, she serves as their guide to Scottish culture (trousers vs. pants, crisps vs. chips; porridge, haggis, Scottish reels). Knight has a lot of fun with stereotypes on both sides of the pond. Pen texts playfully about North America’s use of baseball terminology as a metaphor for sex (first base, second base, etc.); Fergus speaks of Queen Elizabeth “as a beloved relative” and is often moved to break into a spirited rendition of “Rule, Britannia!”

Fergus has a huge crush on Pen. But Pen has a crush of her own. She wangles an invitation to Lennox’s castle, Talmòrach, and falls instantly in love with the entire family: Lennox’s warm, intelligent wife, Christina, who, it turns out, had also known Pen’s dad; his famous fashion-designer sister, Margot, and her daughter, George (short for Georgina); and, above all and most passionately, his son Sasha. Rather repressed (when Alice once tried to get her to skinny-dip at camp, it was “like trying to convince a nun to try group sex”) and still a virgin in her late teens, Pen is touchingly surprised and dazzled by these new feelings. She and Sasha text flirtatiously but inconclusively, and there is one weekend at the Lennoxes’ when he seems to ignore her altogether. She is so wounded that she even encourages Fergus for a time. But what’s a literary romance without a few obstacles?

Because Pen is clever and instinctively kind and starting to become her own person, she holds her own amidst the sophisticated company she finds at the Lennoxes’ estate, especially the very intimidating Margot (“as hard as black ice”). The scenes Knight creates at Talmòrach have sharpness and wit, reminding me a lot of a Nancy Mitford novel. But they never become purely satirical. There’s tenderness, too, and acute observation. Pen, as an outsider, regales us with the luscious details of everything from food to clothes to decor, as well as noting the tensions that underlie this complex and seductive family. It makes sense that she aspires to a career in journalism.

As a child of divorce myself, I was impressed by how accurately Knight captures Pen’s ambivalent relationship with her parents: both her elusive father --- a scene mingling childhood comfort and adult inquisition takes place at a chic Edinburgh restaurant --- and her emotionally generous but equally reticent mother, whom she quizzes during a holiday visit to Toronto. With neither parent completely forthcoming about the past, Pen only gradually finds the link between the Lennoxes and her own family, and unearths the sad intricacies of the marriage’s breakdown.

I did detect a few first-novel lapses. There’s an awkward and, to me, superfluous framing device labeled “Now” at the beginning and end of the book wherein the grown-up Pen communes with her newborn child. And although this is clearly Pen’s story, Knight switches the point of view to other characters so frequently that the power of the narrative is somewhat diluted. Finally, if you are wondering what any of this has to do with the life cycle of the common octopus, the answer is: not much.

Thanks to the film My Octopus Teacher and Shelby Van Pelt’s fictional REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES, these marvelous life-forms have acquired cachet in the last couple of years. But THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS refers to the popular cephalopod only as a metaphor for maternal self-sacrifice. In a scene at the London Aquarium that arrives late in the novel, Margot Lennox tells Pen that octopus mothers start to waste away after laying their eggs --- a cautionary tale for women, as she sees it. Margot refused to marry when she got pregnant 26 years ago, choosing to raise Georgina alone while pursuing her design career, and was thus viewed as a “selfish monster.” Her sister-in-law, Christina Lennox, gives Pen a more cheerful take on motherhood. Nature ensures that parents, at some point, get out of the way of their kids, she says, but that doesn’t mean wives and mothers are doomed to become octopus-like martyrs.

It’s nice that the novel’s older females make sure this lively young woman knows she has a choice. But I’m not crazy about the parallels between octopus and human behavior, which seem forced, or the title, which seems misleading. Knight’s thoroughly charming and heartfelt novel deserves better.