My thanks to NetGalley for a free ARC of "The Dolphin House" by Aundrey Schulman.
First I need to praise this author for bringing animals to life on page.
The dolphin's interactions were so interesting to witness.
The story is a retelling of the real language study on dolphins in the 1960's.
Cora is living in close proximity to dolphins and tries to teach them language. Being partialy deaf, she has a great inclination at paying atention to the captive dolphins. Due to the time period, the fact that she has no previous training in the field and being a woman sorounded by men complicates her situation and she has to push herself to adapt at this workplace.
But Cora's bonds wit the dolphins were more of a success.
My fascination with animals played a big role in my enjoynment of the book.
I woud recommend "The Dolphin House" to all those readers who love animals and one of a kind conection between human and nature.

t is 1965 and Cora, a deaf young woman, buys a one-way ticket to the island of St Thomas, where she discovers four dolphins held in captivity, part of an experiment led by an obsessive Dr Bloom. Drawn by a strong connection to the dolphins, untrained Cora falls in with the scientists to protect the animals.

Recognising Cora's knack for communication, Bloom uses her for what will turn into one of the most fascinating experiments in modern science: an attempt to teach the dolphins human language.

As the experiment progresses, Cora forges a remarkable bond with the creatures that leads to a clash with the male-dominated world of science, threatening to engulf the experiment as Cora’s fight to save the dolphins becomes a battle to save herself.

The Dolphin House, Audrey Schulman's sixth novel, is closely based on a real scientific scandal of the 1960s. A young white woman, Margaret Lovatt, lived with a male dolphin called Peter in a partly flooded house on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, hoping to teach him to communicate with humans by mimicking human language through his blowhole. Her early efforts were surprisingly successful, but the project was derailed when it transpired that Peter was rubbing himself on Lovatt to masturbate (in the wild, dolphins are very social and sexual) and that she allowed this to happen for the sake of the experiment. A sensationalised story in Hustler misleadingly entitled 'Interspecies Sex' destroyed the credibility of the research, and, Lovatt recalled decades later, 'The worst experiment in the world, I've read somewhere, was me and Peter.' Schulman sets out to rehabilitate Lovatt's work through her fictional protagonist, Cora, who, unlike Lovatt, has Native American heritage and is partly deaf.

Schulman challenges the prurient narratives that have grown up around the 'dolphin house' experiment, having Cora point out that this kind of interaction with animals may not be ethical but is hardly unheard of - her pig farmer father 'helped' boars along to encourage them to mate with sows, for example. She also explores Cora's own experience of sexual objectification and assault by the men who are in charge of the experiment, making Cora reflect on how mid-twentieth-century America views 'sex' - including, for example, plenty of non-consensual interactions between men and women. (Pointedly, Cora reads in the paper about a group of men who raped a woman who, unbeknownst to them, died before they started having sex with her - and who were then let off the charge of rape because corpses can't say no.) And beyond the 'sex scandal' element of this experiment, Schulman presents a fascinating and harrowing picture of research with dolphins in the 1960s, exploring both their innate capabilities and how little they're understood by their human captors. Cora is desperate to prevent the further exploitation of the dolphins she works with, but is ultimately unable to stop it.

This novel is so intelligent and so interesting that I'm struggling to work out why I didn't really click with it as a work of fiction (it would have been brilliant as a long essay). It doesn't help that the mood is relentlessly grim, even in the earlier, more joyful scenes where Cora is working with a group of dolphins. But the biggest problem for me was Cora herself. Schulman is so determined to rewrite Lovatt's reputation that I think she goes a bit too far. Cora is continuously idealised, always right in every situation, always there to tell the reader what they should think. The additions of her deafness and her Native heritage further amplifies this impression. I never really forgot that she was a fictional construction. So as non-fiction, this is brilliant; as fiction, it's a little lacking. 3.5 stars.