I was sold on this book the moment I saw the subtitle. Who doesn’t hear a true crime natural history, with eels, and want to know more? Unfortunately I still feel like I want to know more even after reading the book. It’s not a bad book, and it’s got a lot of interesting facts and history that surprised me, but it really only skims the surface, rather than giving me the in-depth information I wanted. The other issue I had with it was that it felt really disorganized--perhaps more like a series of essays than a coherent book. Each essay was interesting, but it was over too soon and as soon as I was getting into my rhythm I got yanked away and turned on to the next thing.

A book like this could have been elevated if it had had poetic and exquisitely crafted sentences, but unfortunately this book, while perfectly fine, is more taking the strategy of making the prose disappear into the background. It is at its strongest when the author is profiling the individuals who have been obsessed by eels, and at its weakest when its’ trying to take a broader historical view.

In the end, if you’re interested in reading a collection of essays about eels, you’ll like this book, but I can’t recommend it as an entry point into non fiction about the ocean when The Underworld is out there.

I received an advance copy in exchange for this honest review.

Well researched and very interesting non-fiction work revolving around eels. It was very easy to read, but delivered on information that made me want to keep reading. I enjoyed Ruppel Shell's writing style.

This is a prime example of what I would consider a perfect microhistory – a book devoted to a particular animal (or food, etc.) that I have literally never given a second thought about before, which not only covers its subject in deep detail, but pulls back the curtain to reveal an entire fascinating world revolving around it that was so deeply unknown to me that it almost comes as a shock. Never could I have imagined that the mere eel had so much mystery surrounding its reproductive habits to this very day. And I most definitely never, ever could not have imagined the eel to be at the center of such a massively lucrative worldwide trade – and a trade that was so rotten with illegality of all sorts, at that. Between all the information that it had to share, plus the way that author Ellen Shell’s witty writing framed it, “Slippery Beast” quickly proved itself to be such a deliciously informative read within that I devoured it within just a few quick days.