You like this character, she\u2019s under your skin; you want to go on this journey with her. And then she says, \u201cI\u2019ve decided to die.\u201d It\u2019s only page 27.<\/p>\n
Beautiful, emotional, and tearing at your moorings, this is a story for the ages, a meditation on what connects us throughout our evolutionary history.\u00a0 Without sentimentality, Charlotte McConaghy takes the reader on a searing emotional roller coaster right to the edge of the abyss, and then she pushes; we gasp and claw to right ourselves.<\/p>\n
A wild woman who soars only when surrounded by water or skies, who will leap without hesitation into freezing water to rescue others, Franny Stone is a woman you\u2019d perhaps consider brave and ferocious until you realize that she has lost everything\u2014and so has nothing left to lose. She lives in a soon-to-be world we all recognize, where we are \u201cunable to stop the maddening inevitable doom we have built.\u201d \u00a0And with this, Charlote McConaghy yanks us into her novel\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n
The recognition is so instant, and rings so true, we begin to feel we may have been shaken from the dream that living on earth used to be. The birds have all disappeared; the fish decimated; many species of animals extinct. We, too, have lost everything and begin to feel the claustrophobia Fanny feels, trapped by a teeming world devoid of meaning, without the sound of a feather moving on an updraft through the air.<\/p>\n
With characters from central casting, fishermen who still haul their living out of the deep because they have been doing it for generations, Migrations <\/em>follows Fanny Stone on a vessel named Saghani<\/em> (Inuit for Raven), chasing a dwindling group of Arctic terns on their last migration. In return for her passage, she has promised the ship\u2019s captain, Ennis, that she will lead them to fish if they follow these terns.<\/p>\n With alternating chapters, Fanny\u2019s past life is revealed along with her reasons for her desperate existential exploration. Abandoned as a child. Sleep walker. Loves fiercely. Takes to children. Liar. Murderer. Attempted suicide with her toothbrush. Married, and yet, belongs nowhere. Fanny\u2019s inability to stay in one place, to be captured and kept runs like a lightning bolt throughout this novel. With every salvaged animal in captivity, even if caged to be saved and sheltered, we feel the panic and breathlessness of confinement. A female gray wolf (thought to be extinct) is captured, and Fanny says \u201cI can\u2019t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage. It\u2019s only humans who deserve that fate.\u201d<\/p>\n The book is saturated with the realities we now predict, chilling events within our grasp in 2020: \u201cthe extinction crisis an acceptable trade for greed,\u201d the earth\u2019s species \u201cviolently and indiscriminately slaughtered by our indifference.\u201d Fanny visits Yellowstone Park devoid of deer, bears, wolves.<\/p>\n And yet. . . the electronically tagged arctic terns\u2014the few surviving on their last migration, fly just out of reach, chased by the Saghani<\/em>, but still visible\u2014as \u201cred beacons of hope\u201d\u2014dots on the ship\u2019s computer.<\/p>\n In spite of the sadness of these losses, we want to read on; the writing is breathtaking and by now, our hearts are held captive by this writer. Fanny leaps into yet another body of freezing water and we jump in with the gorgeous prose that describes it; we survive violent storms on the ship\u2019s deck,\u00a0 we wake with Fanny coughing and gagging in a sleep-walking dream, we hear of the extinction of the raven, the kestrel, 80 percent of all wild animal life. Ironically, the hated rat and cockroach are \u201cfucking miracles\u201d who are still among us in the wake of decimation of other species and in spite of human effort to be rid of them.<\/p>\n As Fanny writes with longing to her husband in her journal, somewhere in the world, the last family of elephants is slaughtered by poachers for their tusks. Finally, governments come belatedly to their senses as a complete ban on fishing is imposed around the world.<\/p>\n Arriving at port, Fanny defends herself at knifepoint against \u201cthe anger to swallow the world\u201d inflicted upon her by a placard-holding protester, and the entire crew\u2014in an act of solidarity for Fanny\u2014flees back into the ship, into the water, and now they\u2019re all fugitives. On board, mutiny erupts as Basil the cook turns them in, and suddenly police vessels descend upon the limping ship.<\/p>\n Fanny asks important but elusive questions for the ages: What does a death matter? What is life worth? And not just a human life. The theme of choking is woven throughout and parallels our gagging culture, stuffed with plastic and toxic human excess, hubris and stupidity. But the heartache at the core of this book revolves around love. When we understand all that has been lost, it\u2019s no wonder we have felt it in every word; the book builds to an almost unbearable realization of what has already been lost.<\/p>\n And then, McConaghy pulls us back from the frightening abyss with hope and love that even after the harshness, are powerful enough to salvage something of the beauty in this world we hardly know anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You like this character, she\u2019s under your skin; you want to go on this journey with her. And then she says, \u201cI\u2019ve decided to die.\u201d It\u2019s only page 27. Beautiful, emotional, and tearing at your moorings, this is a story for the ages, a meditation on what connects us throughout our evolutionary history.\u00a0 Without sentimentality, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5412,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5413,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5411\/revisions\/5413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}