I'm not hugely familiar with Steinbeck - but now I really want to be! I had no expectations of this book, but when I finished it I was just so glad that I'd taken the opportunity to read it. It's delightful, and so well and minutely observed! (And with quite a lot of marine biology; as someone who spends her grad-student time waiting on tides and messing about in the intertidal zone, I was very taken with Doc.)

It's not really a typical novel; more a sequence of vignettes about people living on the Row, but it was wry and compassionate and genuinely-believing-the-best-of-people and I was utterly charmed.

Definitely going to read more Steinbeck! If I like the rest of his stuff half as much as I liked this it'll be worth adding him to the ever-increasing pile of books threatening to topple over and smother me in my sleep.