I've tried several times to read this novel, but at 20% I give up. The writing is beautiful and the message of climate change is a relevent cautionary tale, However, I can't connect to Franny or care about her past or what will happen to her.

I seem to be in the minority so please check other reviews. I am clearly the wrong reader for this book. Since I did not finish I will not review on social media sites.

Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for a free e-book in exchange for an honest review.

"The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here." And so the story begins.

Set in the world sometime in a very near, possible future, when the extinction of popular animal species is common, Migrations is the haunting, lyrical story of a young conservationist following the world's last arctic terns on their migration. But is Franny just following the birds, or is she running away? What dark secrets from her past are coming to the surface? As Charlotte McConaghy's beautiful sentences show us, Franny is writing letters to her husband, looking back on their marriage as well as skirting traumatic experiences of her younger self, and slowly the reader begins to learn all of the things Franny is hiding.

"Inside the pages of a novel lived the only beauty offered up by the world."

"It isn't fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay."

Powerful and descriptive, Migrations is a story you won't soon forget.

4.5 stars.

Franny has wandered her entire life. She always feels unsettled and feels the need to seek something out. As we meet her, she is starting to track some Arctic terns as they begin their long migration from Greenland to Antartica. The world is in a dire place, many animal species have gone extinct and the Arctic tern are amongst the last birds on Earth. Franny fears this may be the terns' last migration. Franny convinces the captain of a small fishing vessel to follow the tracker ping. She promises that where the birds go, there will be fish. As the ship journeys south, the crew (and the reader) begin to realize that Franny has a mysterious past of her own. Through a series of flashbacks we learn some more about Franny's past and that it has it's share of secrets.

This was a beautiful and melancholy planet. Though the book is set at an unknown time in the near future, it feels all to real with the impending threat of global warming. We learn that many wild species have gone extinct but that domesticated animals are still alive due mostly to the fact that humans ensure they survive as a food source. The currents have become more dangerous and the fish population is also drastically depleted. The world is close enough to our own that we can picture it. I saw the book as more character-driven though. Franny is an unreliable narrator. but I felt empathetic towards her and whatever mysterious forces drive her. She is definitely someone with a lot of issues and we get some peeks as the book progresses as to what may have caused some of those issues.

What to Listen to While Reading
Global Warming by LPX
Meticulous Bird by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
Angels by The xx
Arctic Tern by Aaron Lansing
A closeness by Dermot Kennedy
Sleepwalking by Modest Mouse
First Love/Late Spring by Mitski
Wanderer by Cat Power

This book has a little bit of everything, mystery, murder, adventure and a love story, but it is also an “eco-lit” story of events to come. Not quite dystopian because it is not related to the government but rather the impact of climate change on the larger ecosystem.
I love how the story goes back and forth in time periods from present (future time) and back four, eight, 12 or 19 years and forwards. I like the puzzle of putting the narrators story in place to reveal the larger picture.

Migrations is at once a story of a desperate woman, Franny, following an almost-extinct bird across oceans, and a deep dive into what it means to forgive and heal after a life-shattering event. McConaghy writes a story set in the near future that pulses with life, even as the vibrant animal life that used to populate the world has mostly died off. While the plot centers around the idea of ecological preservation and conservation, McConaghy aligns a climate-centric perspective with a deeply personal journey to forgive and love oneself.

Just as the few remaining animals have had to learn to adapt to their new world in order to survive, so does Franny, whose journey we witness as she struggles on land, at sea, and in her memories. She deals with an intense grief related to multiple events in her life, that has compounded into a darkness that might seem impossible to push past. There is so much hurt and love buried together in Franny's past, and it was absolutely heartbreaking to watch it unfold as I continued to read. McConaghy has woven flashbacks to Franny's past throughout the book, and the flashbacks are non-linear, creating a tense and emotional story that you won't want to look away from.

While many moments in this book can be hard to read, and can bring up intense feelings, there are moments where the beauty of nature shine through. McConaghy's writing is clever, sharp, and makes both the natural world and Franny's interior world shine through with feeling and love. This story, while bleak at times, shows how distance doesn't fray all bonds, and how love and family can show up for you in the most unexpected moments. This novel is one about saving yourself, along with the world that you live in, and this message is especially necessary now as we are fighting for so much change in our society. I absolutely loved this book, and I hope it will stay with me for a long time.

I do not understand the praise this book is getting.

It’s compared to Station Eleven because, as you find out naturally as the book progresses, it is set in a world (possibly our own future) in which animal and plant life is all but gone, at least in places inhabited by humans.

Our main character is Franny Lynch (nee Stone). She’s on a mission to get aboard a fishing vessel since it’s the only way she thinks she’ll be able to achieve her last goal in life: follow the last remaining colony of Arctic terns, sleek white birds with black caps, on their final migration. She manages to talk her way onto the Saghani and gets a crash course on how to survive at sea from the boat’s crew.

There are just as many flashbacks as there are scenes in the present. We’re hopping around to various points in Franny’s life which gets very confusing even though we’re given the years in which these scenes happen. It’s confusing because of all the bouncing around and because just about everything you start off believing about Franny turns out to be untrue.

Franny might be the most boring unreliable narrator I’ve ever experienced. We’re told that she wanders and the author beats you about the head with the fact that it’s *in her blood.* It’s just part of her *nature* that she abandons places and therefore people in order to go off and do...what, exactly? Who knows.

Franny sleepwalks and knows that she can become violent and behave recklessly when she does so, but there’s no information about how long she’s had this condition or if it was induced by any kind of stressful or traumatic situation. Nor does she ever seek help for it. She’s clearly not well - she basically starts off the book telling us she’s suicidal, but it’s not until the very end of the book that you start to get a sense of why she might feel that way.

Because this author wanted the shock factor at the end of the book, she wrote a character who’s tortured for the sake of being tortured for the first three quarters. She crammed all the truth - the realities of Franny’s life - at the back end of the book and used an unreliable narrator to excuse that.

Nothing about this book was executed well, but what had me seething was the unforgivably lazy world building. As an author, you cannot, and I mean CANNOT, just say that this world is now devoid of most animal and plant life without discussing the cataclysmic effect it would have. Nothing on Earth would be the same. You can’t just flippantly say that the world’s forests are gone and not comment on what this means! What’s the world’s human population now? How are crops growing? How far advanced is global warming? How high are sea levels? Does the change in sea levels have an impact on currents and the navigation of this fishing vessel?

To ignore those HUGE issues in favor of trying to make the reader feel an emotional connection with a deluded liar is downright unacceptable to me. I am livid at this publisher for promoting the blatant lie that this book is similar to Station Eleven. Say what you will about the writing in Station Eleven (I liked it, but I know others didn’t), but there was a whole well-thought out world in that book.

This book is proof that publishers and readers go to mush for tortured characters and emotionally manipulative stories regardless of whether they’re actually good. Franny and this book can go ahead and migrate out of my life.

I was intrigued with the book cover and the premise about Franny Stone. She arrives in Greenland to find the world’s last flock of Arctic terms & follow them on their final migration. She wiggles herself onboard the Saghani, convincing the captain and shipmates she is a scientist. Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for an ebook ARC. This is my honest review.

Migrations is unlike anything I've read and I read three books a week on average.. It takes place in Greenland, on the sea, the arctic....it tackles love, loss, family and hope in a magical way. I don’t want to give any spoilers or summary— read it cold and devour the beauty of the prose.

I loved the adventure of travel and the impassioned characters in Migrations by Charlotte McCaunaghy. Franny Stone’s journey to follow the last of the arctic terns to Antartica is what she believes is her final chance to reclaim herself. She is heading toward devastation, along with the wildlife she is so passionate about. Her marriage to ornithologist, Niall Lynch is loving but strained, and with her overwhelming need to travel, and the birds are heading toward extinction, Franny leaves her husband home to track the flight path of the birds, in search of purpose and to ensure survival.

“It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”

She finds herself on a fishing boat with an eclectic crew, and after convincing Ennis Malone, the captain, she can lead them to fish by following the birds, he agrees to have her aboard. With the fish supply dwindling, the crew members don’t fully trust Franny, but take the risk by including her.

Author Charlotte McCaunaghy skillfully takes us out to sea through rough waters which often times feels like a love letter to nature.

“We are the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we are the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe. It’s a miracle we’re here at all, when you think about it like that.”

Through letters to her husband, Niall, Franny reveals herself; the desperate search for her mother, the impulsive decision to marry, and details of her emotional past, giving us a deeper understanding of her sorrows. The reasons for her journey gain importance and a sense of urgency, both deeply personal and with an eye toward nature and wildlife survival.

The desperation, self destruction and willfulness of Franny and Ennis, the captain, were all consuming, while the challenges of the sea, and the quest toward the birds’ final destination were ridden with emotion. I loved this engaging story of loss and hope; Migrations is a wonderful and moving journey.


Author Q & A
Q: Did you intend to write the story of Franny as a metaphor for a bird…on a quest, not able to settle down in one place, following her instincts and being in the open air? Ennis had similar traits; two birds of a feather?

A: I did. It seemed important that the woman who set out to follow the last birds understood them on a level most people may not. She’s as migratory as they are, and almost as connected to the natural world. She says in the book that she feels born in the wrong body and I think that’s because she feels too wild to be human. She and Ennis are similar in a lot of ways, not least of which is their shared love of the sea, and their understanding of each other’s obsessions.

Q: You chose for Ennis’s boat to follow the birds the long, less direct way. Ennis and his crew were risk takers, so why did they make that choice?

A: Initially they start out on their original fishing route because the birds haven’t left Greenland yet, but if my memory serves me I think they do go the direct route south, whereas the birds take a curving path to follow the winds in the hope of fish. I think to start with Ennis and his crew are set in their ways, it scares them to think of leaving their known routes and going on a journey into seas they don’t know. But their needs are great and so they’re forced to follow the birds much further south.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the book? What peaked your interest when it came to the arctic terns? What type of research did you do?

A: The idea for the book came from lots of different places but the largest pieces came to me when I was traveling around the UK and visited Iceland. I spent a lot of time watching the migratory birds up in the north of the world and it got me thinking about their long flight. I fell in love with the Arctic terns in particular when I discovered they have the longest migration of any animal in the world, such tiny creatures that travel so far. I read as much as I could about them, and watched videos of the way they fly, the sounds they make, their behavioural patterns.

Q: Have you been to any of the locations you wrote about in the book?

A: I’ve spent time in Galway, which is where Franny is from, and I grew up on my Dad’s farm on the south coast of Australia, where Franny is sent when she’s a teenager. But unfortunately I haven’t been to Greenland or Antarctica – two places that are on my bucket list. I did, as I mentioned above, visit Iceland, which is where I heard the sound that great glacial ice makes when it cracks and where I was inspired to write about icy adventures. Here is a picture of me on an Icelandic beach:


Q: Franny’s feelings about fishing made her feel conflicted with her decision to travel on the boat with people who made their life all about catching fish. Why did you decide to add to her angst, on top of her other personal struggles?

A: You always need to challenge your protagonist to learn and change; instead of judging their way of life, she learns to accept that we’re all just doing our best to survive, and it’s the systems that have been put in place that need to change so we can change with them. Franny learns that there is more to people than what they seem on the surface, and she is also able to have a positive impact on them.

Q: Self destructive choices lead both Franny and Ennis away from their families and the ability to create a life on solid ground, and the rest of the fishing boat crew all have a transient quality about them too. How did you get into the heads of these personality types?

A: Adventurous characters appeal to me, as do flawed ones. While Franny is certainly a damaged character she’s also an explorer, she loves wild places and creatures and people, and wants to experience as much of the natural world as possible. While I wouldn’t call myself a wanderer, like she is, I definitely see the appeal of living separate from society – after all, this must be some of the appeal of a life at sea. To be free to connect with nature. To live with extreme highs and lows. To build a family with your crewmates. I just allowed myself to be led by the characters, by their fears and desires.

Q: Franny had some vivid, bird related dreams. What was the meaning of that?

A: This is Franny’s inner world made visual; she’s dreaming about the birds because they fill every inch of her. She connects with them, even imagines herself one. Some of her darker dreams symbolise her mental state and how she’s feeling at the time, and whether she’s conflicted about her place in the world. Dreams can be a really simple way to allow a reader into the intimate spaces of a narrator’s heart and mind – without having to explain in words what she’s fearing or desiring.

Q: Are you an active environmentalist and what can we do to help prevent wildlife extinction?

A: I’m not as active as I should be, but I try my best to make small decisions in my daily life that can have a larger impact on our environment, such as choosing not to eat meat, to reduce my carbon footprint, riding my bike instead of driving my car when I can, reducing our household waste as much as possible by composting and recycling, and giving to as many wildlife and environment charities as possible, it makes all the difference to the groups who are on the front lines, doing all they can to save the animals. It’s also worth contacting local politicians about the issues you care about.

Q: If Migrations was made into a movie, (It would be so amazing!) what actors would you like to be in the cast?

A: It really would be amazing! Um this is a tricky one… I always imagined a Rooney Mara type as Franny. Maybe Adam Driver as Niall. And I’m not sure about Ennis… I can picture like a big gentle bear type, someone like Russel Crowe? But to be honest I don’t really picture how my characters look, not too specifically anyway, so anyone with the right essence or charisma would be fine by me.

Q: What is your writing process…do you make an outline and work out all your characters and their connections beforehand?

A: Yes I make a map of characters and their traits and backstories. Then I beat out the story – so I come up with my three act structure and the key beats of the plot, and I know generally where I want the book to end, but then I leave the rest to come to me while I write. I don’t like to do too much planning because I find it makes the writing process less of an exploration. My characters lead me where they will and that’s the joy.

Q: What books have you read lately that you recommend?

A: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (if you’re not spooked reading about a pandemic, that is)

"There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness."

--------------------------------------

"A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us".

Franny Stone has always had large volumes of wanderlust coursing through her veins. From? To? Both? Neither? It seems that this is an ancestral gift. Excellent for seeing vast swaths of the planet’s landscape. Maybe not so good for establishing a secure base of operations in, say, maybe, a family, living in, oh, a home.

About twenty minutes into the future, a breathless Franny turns up at the town of Tasiilaq, in Greenland. The fauna of planet Earth have been vanishing at an alarming rate for a long time already. Mass extinctions are no longer the exception, but the rule. Franny wants to hitch a ride with a fishing boat. Her mission? To track the last Arctic terns on the planet as they make their globe-spanning annual migration from the Arctic to the Antarctic. She is happy to take on seamen’s chores while aboard, although her skill-set is somewhat slim. But what she can offer of value is tracking hardware. Terns with trackers on them and a computer that can check where they are. This is of significance to a particularly hard-core fishing boat captain, Ennis Malone, as terns are excellent locators of large schools of fish, and Malone is desperate for one last ”golden catch” before he, and all other fishermen, are banned from practicing their trade, the oceans having been pretty much drained of sustainable piscine life.

Franny’s time talking her way onto, and then shipping out on, the good ship Saghani, is our home-base present for the novel. From here we flip back to several times in Franny’s life. Two, four, six, ten, twelve, nineteen years and one year before. Each peel back parts of her life. We learn of Franny’s many secrets with each look back. McConaghy sustains tension by showing us just enough, getting us to bite, then yanking us to the next chapter, the next time and place, with the last chapter end’s hook still in us.

Franny has several loves as well as secrets. She is a creature of the sea, an amazing swimmer, having an unnatural tolerance for oceanic chill, which she demonstrates by diving into such frigid water on rescue missions, with no apparent attention being paid to her personal safety. You wouldn’t be surprised if she crawled out of the water sporting an Ariel-like flipper instead of legs.

The sea for her is one of the great loves of her life. Maybe it’s the family she never had. She feels more connected to her body, and weightless, and almost able to fly like the birds she loves. - from the -WriterUnboxed interview

She is smitten with birds. We learn that she had had a particularly connected dealing with crows as a child. In another one of the lookbacks she is working at a University, decides to pop into an ornithology class, to bolster her innate interest, and finds, unsurprisingly, that she loves it, that she has an excellent feel for the course material. This does not go unnoticed by the professor, who is soon gaga over her. Niall’s love for the natural world, birds in particular, is as great as Franny’s love for the sea, but he is able to fulfill this passion by study, research, and teaching, without having to give up everything to pursue his interest. A stable passion, although no less a passion than hers.

Niall is absolutely symbolic of the birds for Franny. He represents the idea that you can study what you love without taking away from the magic in those things. - from the Dead Darlings interview

Their relationship takes flight, Franny’s third true love, but her wanderlust remains overpowering. It was always there, still is, and e’er will be.

I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

The family piece is important. Her mother encouraged her to read a lot. In addition to expanding her brain, it was a way for Franny to leave, without having to physically take off. And it worked. Her mother was particularly sensitive to leaving, having been abandoned by her mother as a child. Franny knew about this, and her mother’s promise that if Franny ever left it would be the last straw for her. The call comes when Franny is ten, and she does an adventurous runner with a fellow adventurer. But when she comes back two days later, Mom is gone. And Franny is packed off to her grandparents in Australia, her father having been out of the picture for a long time. Adult Franny goes on a search to find out what had happened to her mother, one of several lookback threads.

It was really important to me to write the moments in Franny’s past that make her who she is, and for the reader to be able to experience those moments on an intimate level with her, because I felt that this would allow readers to connect more deeply with her and what drives her through the story. There’s also a lot of tension to be built in using suspension and mystery—you leave clues peppered throughout and only reveal information at moments that will create catharsis for your readers. - from the Amazon interview

Franny sustains a number of secrets. Aboard the boat she suffers from night terrors, even to the point of some life-threatening somnambulism. Why? What’s the deal with all those letters she writes but fails to send? What happened with her mother? Is that even a secret or just a mystery? There are more. And she is not the only one. Some of the Saghani crew have plenty of their own.

The migration theme is worked vigorously. Franny’s innate pull to here or there is certainly of a kind with the migration urges of birds. We get to see the migration of the terns in action. There is even mention of a very long-term migration involving ocean currents. The fishermen must migrate to follow the fish, who also migrate.

One of Franny’s needs is to try to find or construct a family. Niall presents one way in which to have an actual home base. He offers her a lot of space to be who she is. One can also see the Saghani crew as a kind of family. They certainly look after one another in a familial way. She can be herself to a significant degree with them, salve her loneliness as they have theirs. Franny’s searching for her mother is also driven by this familial need. Even if you are going to be in and out, you need a place to hang your hat, or maybe it is not so much defined by the place but by people. Home, then, is wherever you are, when you are with the people you love.

The future McConaghy portrays is grim, but she had not set out to bum everyone out, or parade back and forth wearing a sandwich board, screaming “Repent!” She is not interested in tossing harpoons. One measure of this is how sympathetically she portrays the fishermen, even knowing that their work is part of the problem. It is a very human look at things.

I didn’t want to write a dystopian novel about the physical impacts of climate change, such as what would become of our food supply. I wanted this to be an existential look at the way the loss of the animals would make us feel, and I think this was a refusal of the idea that humans are the most important things on this planet, and that everything exists in service to us. I wanted the world I drew to look almost identical to the world today, apart from that one major difference, hoping that this would be a more confronting way to predict how close a future without animals really is. - from the Amazon interview

Franny Stone is a fascinating and engaging character. Admittedly, most of us will not share her compulsion to just go. But, while it is likely that our traumas do not match hers, we have all suffered trauma of one sort or another. And while few of us have had to endure the chained up, tied down feelings or experiences Franny has, many of us have spent long stretches of time in places and/or situations we would rather not inhabit (I certainly have). And while we may not have the NEED that Franny experiences, we all have things we want, desires that are unfilled, whether in lower case or bolded caps. So, while we may or may not identify with the specifics of her experience, we can certainly identify in one way or another with Franny’s pain, with what remains unquenched, fueling potential movement.

Migrations is a remarkable book that will transport you, but to a place you will want to see. You will meet interesting characters along the way, try to figure out some mysteries, uncover some secrets, and consider that we are not all made alike. There is on offer here a look at love made difficult by what is inherent, but also a look at how that might be managed. Hopefully, you will consider optimism, the possibility that courses through these pages as well as the dark future they portend. Migrations is a journey well worth taking.

A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together.


Review posted – August 14, 2020

Publication date – August 4, 2020

I received an e-book ARE of Migrations from Flatiron via NetGalley. No long-distance travel was entailed. I did, however, feel unshakably pulled to write a review.

See the full review, with pix and links on Goodreads

A masterpiece. Simply stunning!

Mam used to tell me to look for the clues.

“The clues to what?” I asked the first time.

“To life. They’re hidden everywhere.”

I’ve been looking for them ever since.

A magical mix of fiction, adventure and family saga, 'Migrations' is unlike any book I've read this year. I could not stop thinking about these characters after I finished and felt like a best friend had moved away when the book ended.

Franny is following the last Arctic terns as they complete their difficult journey from the Arctic to the Antarctic. At first Franny seems brusque and unlikable but slowly her tragic history is revealed through a series of letters she has written to her beloved husband, Niall, a professor who also shared her obsession and love for wildlife and nature. Franny has convinced the captain of the fishing boat Saghani to allow her to work on his boat so that she can track the path of the terns. It is a difficult and bone-breaking journey, and the rest of the crew resents her at first due to her complete lack of sailing experience.

Franny's heartbreaking past comes to light over the course of the Saghani's journey, and her life seems to parallel that of the Earth's vanishing wildlife. The setting of the book is sometime in the near future after humans have almost decimated the environment. The Saghani is barely surviving as a fishing vessel and Franny's mission seems completely hopeless, but she rallies the captain and crew who become just as obsessed with tracking the elusive terns. The author is a powerful writer, and my emotions were all over the place while listening to this book.

"I have never feared the sea. I have loved it with every breath of my, every beat of my heart."

I listened to the audio book and the narrator's magnetic, lilting voice captivated me from the first few minutes. I highly recommend listening to this story, as it is truly an unforgettable, emotional experience. Don't miss this novel, it is absolutely spectacular!

Migrations
A Novel
by Charlotte McConaghy
Flatiron Books
Women's Fiction
Pub Date 04 Aug 2020 | Archive Date 25 Aug 2020

This book is well written and a pleasure to read. It really surprised me because I have not read anything by this author. Thanks to NetGalley and FlatIron books for the ARC of this book..

5 star

There is a bit of a mystery in this book, and it’s about our central character’s life, Franny Stone. What happened in her past? She is obsessed with birds and since nearly all are now gone, she has taken it upon herself to follow the Arctic Terns migration from the north to Antarctic.

Franny certainly has a penchant for swimming in icy cold oceans. In the first pages she jumps into the cold waters to rescue what looks to be a drowning man. And her luck is with her as he turns out to be a captain of the fishing boat she was looking to join.

The book is dark and bleak, with nearly the entirety of animals gone from this world. The story is told by going from present to past and various points in the past. I really loved the part where she and her husband meet and grow to know each other. Fanny is one who leaves, and gets that wandering from her family. Franny is never easy on herself, and it seems to come out even more during her sleep while sleepwalking she can do terrible things, or nearly.

Despite how difficult the book was to read at times I did enjoy it. The language had a feel of poetry and it drew me in right away. I wanted to know what happened with Franny, her past, her family, and slowly it was revealed. This is not a long book, but it is on that can stay with you long after reading.

I really liked this book. Unique, thought provoking and unexpected are how I would describe it. I read this right after The Overstory and have recommended these two books in tandem to others. Migrations will make you think about our relationship to our environment while also telling an interesting and different story. I honestly did not know how this book would end and that’s so refreshing.

Have you ever read a book that you knew as soon as you finished it, it would forever leave a scar on your heart and soul? One that completely shattered you but you couldn't stop reading it? Migrations is one of those books for me. This dark yet beautifully rendered story is very raw, primal and heart wrenching. Franny Stone is a wanderer at heart and by following the ocean's tides and the Arctic Terns, she feeds a mysterious, burning need within while also seeking solace for past transgressions, guilt, and regret. The world's on the brink of disaster with all wildlife near extinction. Franny makes her way to Greenland and hitches a ride on one of the last fishing vessels in order to follow the last migration of the Arctic Terns to their final resting place. It soon becomes clear that Franny is driven by demons and ghosts she can't outrun as she pushes her mind and body to the edge. As her cover story begins to unwind, her tightly wrapped layers and closely guarded secrets unravel to reveal the pain she carries and the hidden force driving her. Piece by piece, readers will learn her truth.

I don't have the words to explain the impact this story, Franny and the rest of the misfit crew had on me. Without permission, these characters burrowed under my skin, overwhelmed my senses, left me reeling and breathless and forever changed. The heart-wrenching, twisted story unfurls at a brisk pace via a strong, compelling, and yet somewhat fragile and unstable narrator leaving little doubt Franny's mission is inspired by concealed secrets. Why does she feel impelled to follow the final migration of the terns? Guilt, devastating loss, redemption, the sheer will to survive and the power of love are all key in this bleak, yet beautiful story of how far one will go for love. I'd like to say "Thank You" to author Charlotte McConaghy for sharing this masterpiece with the world. I hope people will heed the warning to take care of each other and this wondrous world we are privileged to reside in for a short period in time. Migrations is a unique, gripping, timely story that now resides on my Favorites List. I can't wait to explore more of this author's work. Highly Recommended!

Really enjoyed the characters in this book. Even the ones who had only a small role felt whole. The use of multiple timelines was done quite well. I loved that the message about the fate of the world was as important as the storyline of Franny, but didn’t overwhelm her story, Franny was such a fractured soul, but her story was compelling; I loved that her story was compelling to the other characters in the book, too. . I found myself racing to finish the book, and now I am sad that it is done!

I chose to read this novel as a palette cleanser of sorts, something to break up some of the darker thrillers I’ve been reading lately. Within the first dozen pages or so, I knew I’d come across my first five-star book of the year.

Franny’s character is wrought with loss and a lack of stability. Her love and respect for birds is easy to understand, for her need to take flight is undeniable. Early on, the reader knows she’s recovering from the loss of someone, but who? Her mother? Her father? Her stillborn daughter? Even Franny herself doesn’t really comprehend the power of the loss she is confronting.

I found myself immediately captivated by this novel. I honestly don’t have an interest in birds, and find it shocking that other reviews can’t see past that to see the true beauty in what McConaghy has written. The birds are Franny’s passion, her vehicle for attempting to comprehend all that has been taken from her. They are her only tried and true sense of stability. Their path is reliable, while her own is the complete opposite.

Ignore any claims that this is a clunky novel; it is everything but that. Don’t discount it because it’s a “climate novel.” Rather, sit back and witness the beauty of the message this author is attempting to relay. You will be handsomely rewarded. Highly, highly recommended.

I never thought I would love a book about birds as much as I did this one. Set in a near-future version of our world, in which almost all the animals have gone extinct, Franny Lynch sets off on a quest to follow the arctic tern on what might be the species’ last migration. But while the story of these birds is an important part of this book, this is more a story of Franny and her grief. Franny is on her own type of migration and it was a pleasure to be brought into her head as she travels.

The book alternates timelines, between the present and flashbacks to parts of Franny’s adult life. Through these flashbacks, a mystery of what exactly is motivating Franny to follow the terns unravels. What starts out appearing to be a simple scientific mission becomes so much more.

This is very much a character-driven novel. I loved hearing things from Franny’s perspective but also enjoyed the rich secondary characters of the novel. If anything, I wanted a little more from the ship’s crew, particularly Ennis.

The only thing that prevented me from giving this 5 stars was Franny’s relationship with Niall. I struggled with whether we were meant to view it as toxic, but it felt like that at times, and I wish that aspect had been acknowledged more. Overall, though, I loved Franny’s character and the journey she went on, both physically and metaphorically.

Thanks to Flatiron Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

TW: suicide; suicidal ideation; attempted sexual assault; loss of a child.

Thank you to Flatiron Books for gifting me a copy of MIGRATIONS by Charlotte McConaghy.


The first few pages of this book were compelling and well thought out but I didn’t feel as strong of a connection to the story as I had originally thought I would. I sat the book down and after giving it some thought, I decided to try listening to it on audiobook through LibroFm (use code ‘BOOKENDLISTENS” for 2for1 audiobooks) and started the book over. 


There was something so mesmerizing about the narrator's voice that I found myself unable to stop listening to MIGRATIONS. Maybe it was the emotion that was perfectly portrayed by her but I felt as if I were listening to Frank Stone as she sat across from me telling her story. 


MIGRATIONS hit me right in the heart as the author portrayed what our world could look like if we don’t begin taking the environment and our wildlife seriously. The utter devastation that I felt as Franny described the last of the birds dying out, the heaps of trash discovered floating in the ocean, and the disappearance of all fish. I would like to consider myself an environmentally friendly person but this book made me stop to think that I could do more. 


I also enjoyed that there was an added mystery added to the story. Why was Franny running from her life? What did she do that landed her locked inside a prison? It kept me guessing and left me devastated for her and her unimaginable loss.


Thank you again to Flatiron Books for the opportunity to read and review this book; and, thank you to LibroFM for offering an outstanding listening experience!

Fanny's journey of her past, along with finding herself, is one that is heartbreakingly beautiful to read. The author's words come across so vividly whether she is writing about something happy or sad. This book is so well written and a joy to read.