I really enjoyed this book, although it was not what I expected. It gives a sad, stark portrayal of the effects of climate change on our world. In Franny's time, the majority of animals are extinct or near extinction and the story is about her adventure to find the world’s last flock of Arctic terns to follow them throughout their final migration. In order to do so enlists the crew of a ship called The Saghani to help her on her mission and journey across the Atlantic flowing the terns on their flight south. I can really relate to Franny in the pull that the ocean had over her and the allure of nature, so I greatly enjoyed the struggles and triumphs of Franny's harrowing journey at sea. I also really enjoyed the characters that made up the crew of The Saghani. They were all broken in a way but also very likable and relatable. Interestingly and unexpectedly, the book also has an element of mystery as parts of Franny's past unfold gradually throughout the story. My only criticism is that for some reason I did not like Franny's husband Niall, but felt like I should, So the sentimentality and grief related to him were lost on me a bit. Overall, this is a wonderful depiction of a woman's adventurous journey and her struggles with guilt, grief, family, the past, and self-acceptance.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a marketing intern with Flatiron Books. This very astute intern suggested Migrations, assuring me that I was the right reader for said book. After digesting the synopsis and getting rather excited, I agreed to download the e-galley. So, I get a chapter in and immediately know... I AM perfectly suited to this book. Zaynah, thank you for recommending Migrations. If I was your boss I'd give you a raise. Or a promotion. Or both. This book was all kinds of OUTSTANDING!! There are no flaws to be found in the pages of this book. I am sad for those that haven't read it. I'm sad that I have. I miss it already.

I've lived by the sea. It was my backyard. Every day I walked along the shore, marveling at its blue-green waters. Never, not once, did I take it for granted. I knew how fortunate I was. I savored those walks. I took pictures... so many photos. Not wanting to spoil my piece of borrowed paradise, I picked up careless people's trash. I did this because I love nature. I'm crazy-mad about nature! But, the pesty litterbug exists. As long as there are public beaches there will be the inevitable piles of discarded filth. Besides sharing with human pigs, I also shared the beach with many other magnificent creatures, one being nesting sea turtles. I must tell you that one of the greatest pleasures of my life is bearing witness to hatchlings crawl from their sandy nest and race towards the sea. My husband and I were privileged to experience this more than once. Each time as glorious as the first. The turtles hatch under layers and layers of sand. They dig their way out and burst into the sun. The hatchlings must then cross yards and yards of hot beach, all while dodging litter and predators. Cheers erupt when these tiny endangered turtles greet the ocean. They are pummeled by unforgiving waves, spit back as the surge rolls out. But, they keep pushing forward. Finally, the sea swallows them. They belong to the ocean now. Their journey has begun. Those that survive will one day return to the same nesting ground. How I hope! As I watched the hatchlings disappear, I was deeply moved and inspired. After that first encounter, I became a nesting sea turtle volunteer. Puerto Rico stole my heart. I had to give back to all who shared the island with me. When you fall deeply in love you want to protect that affection. I couldn't stand to watch those little ones crawl over filth. It broke me. It's unnecessary, all the trash. If humans are the wiser species, how can some of us be so ignorant?

Then I find myself with this book. The whole time I'm reading about the last migration, the destruction, the neediness of mankind (prepare yourself...this book hurts) I can envision my sea turtles hurtling over trash. I feel Franny's intense need to follow her beloved terns to the ends of the world. I understand Niall's anger at circumstances that CAN be controlled. Those that litter don't have to litter. People do it because they can. Sheer laziness. Who cares, right?! I care. I don't want to swim in your shit!! I don't want turtles, birds, dolphins, and fish adorned with trash growing around their necks or flippers. I hate seeing pigeons with string wrapped around their feet. It's depressing to watch a bird hobble on one leg, struggling to keep up with its mates because it had the misfortune to step in your discarded kite. Yes! Eventually, that string will amputate their little bird foot. But, I digress. I'm feeling all sorts of emotions. Back to the book...

Migrations struck a chord with me. In fact, it hit several high notes and belted out an entire medley. This book resonates with me. Obviously. From the beginning, I knew this book would tear out my heart. Like Franny, I am happiest by the sea. In another life, I was probably a mermaid. I can't explain the oceans pull any more than she can. How can the seas wash away sorrows, yet cause so much devastation? Franny lives her life like the ebb and flow of the tide, pushing and pulling. Franny identifies with the last of the Arctic terns while seeking answers in a world facing mass animal extinction. The Arctic tern is a seabird that has the longest migration of any known animal, from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica. Like the tern, Franny has been migratory since the age of ten. It's a powerful instinct that she cannot control. Where does she belong? To whom? Franny's mam tells her to look for the hidden clues."The clues to what?"

Well, I certainly can't tell you. However, I can tell you that Mam was right. There are lots of hidden gems... some stopped me midsentence, causing a gasp and my heart to skip. I'd continue reading, only slower as if the delay would change the outcome. This story is filled with the most extraordinary metaphors and meanings. McConaghy's eloquent writing is impossible to forget. Profound, soulful, haunting — all this, and so much more. Like Fresh Water for Flowers, a book that was absolute perfection, this one jumps to the top of my 2020 favorites. Fan-freakin-tastic!

*Special thanks to Zaynah Ahmed and Flatiron Books for extending an invitation to download an e-galley. Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy. Most importantly, I wish to give a virtual hug and huge thanks to Charlotte McConaghy for writing a story that moved me completely.

We have never needed a book more than “Migrations”, in 2020.
....during the crescendo of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’re taken on a fascinating, ethical & emotional journey—
...sometimes funny—
...sometimes brave—
...mostly heartbreaking—

”There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar”

With clear and unflinching prose, this startling story is a page turning testimony to the power of love.

“Her name was Franny Stone at birth. Her Irish mother gave birth to her in a small Australian town where she’d been left, broke, and alone.
Eventually they moved to Galway, Iceland where she spent the first decade of her life”.

Franny had a dream - foolish fantasy she called it - of securing a place on a fishing vessel - having a captain carry her as far south as possible, to be able to follow the migration of a bird—the longest natural migration of any living creature.

Franny’s first week in Greenland:
“I’ve been out here on my own for six days. My tent was blown into the sea last night, as wind and rain lashed it from around my body. I’ve been pecked on the skull and hands more than a dozen times by birds who have been named the most protective in the sky”.
“I pause on the crest of the hill to look once more, and the wind calms a moment. The eye spreads wide and dazzling, edged by a black-and-white ocean and a distant gray horizon. Great shards of cerulean ice floats languidly by, even now within the heart of summer. And dozens of Arctic terns fill the white of the sky and earth. The last of them, perhaps in the world. If I were capable of staying anyplace, it might be here. But the birds won’t stay, and neither will I”.

Franny walks through Tasiilaq, Greenland. It’s hilly and lovely with colorful houses perched on the uneven terrain.
“The sky is the sky is a sky, and yet here, somehow, it’s more. It’s bigger”.
She sits and watches icebergs floating through the fjord while thinking about ‘the tern’.
The terns nest along the coast but will fly south soon all the way to Antarctica. She was studying the migratory patterns of the Arctic tern, looking specifically at what climate change has done to their flight habits. It’s what was killing the fish.

“Nobody needs to be told of the extension of the animals; for years now we’ve been watching news bulletins about habitat destruction and species after species being declared first endangered and then officially extinct. There are no more monkeys in a wild, no chimps or apes or gorillas, nor indeed any animal that once lived in rainforest. The big cats of the savannas haven’t been seen in years, nor have any of the exotic creatures we once went on Safari to glimpse”.

If there were any fish left in the ocean, the birds would find them.

Franny was on a mission- traveling on a vessel in Greenland with a colorful crew of men and women—( she begged to tag along with the crew on ‘The Saghani’), offering to work for free.
“The crew didn’t really want Franny there. But she loved every second of the backbreaking laborious eighteen hour days. She had never been more exhausted in her life, but it was perfect. It meant she would sleep”.

The mystery of why Franny had sleep challenges ....will unfold slowly as we learn more about abandonment issues from her past, and the other memories than haunt her.

Highly original—messy, tragic, atmospheric and endlessly inventive.....
An utterly engrossing read— by the phenomenally talented Charlotte McConaghy.

A BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENT...I hope to get a physical copy ... as this was one of the most remarkable and memorable books I’ve read this year.

Huge thanks to Flatiron Books for this advance copy ( I honestly can’t say thank you enough), Netgalley ( thanks for all the work you do to support authors and diehard readers),
and
soooo much appreciation to author Charlotte McConaghy: you’re incredible. I’ll read anything you write again.

DEEPLY EMOTIONALLY MOVING.....the book you want to scream to everyone you know: “READ IT”!

5+++++

"My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless."

Fanny Stone is a lost woman wandering around, searching for answers about those in her past while trying to make sense of her life. She has suffered many losses in her life and sets out on a journey to follow Arctic terns to their final migration. She convinces Ennis Malone, the captain of a shipping vessel to let her join his crew as they follow the terns who they hope will lead them to fish. For this is the crew's last haul. Animals, with the exception of house pets, are extinct, the seas are almost out of fish and Fanny believes this will be the Arctic terns last migration. She sleepwalks and has wanderlust like her mother before her. Franny, like the sea, is erratic and unpredictable.

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

This book is told in varying timelines, but the headings let us know when and where the story is taking place. I found this story telling technique worked in this book, as it symbolizes how erratic and unreliable Franny herself is. This book seeps with sadness and gloom. It is not an uplifting book and tells the tale of a sad life. Having said that, it was beautifully written full of beautiful passages.

" Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfect kind of thing until you have it and it turns on you."

Heartbreaking and Haunting, Migrations is a story of survival, loss, love and facing the truth.

Thank you to Flatioron books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.

Migrations follows Franny Stone's journey following the last of the Arctic terns. The time is in the not too distant future and almost every bird, fish, and wild animal is extinct. Almost all domestic and farmed raised fish, birds, and other animals are raised for food. Global warming has wiped out the food and habitat for most animals. And Franny is planning to die at the end of this last journey of the Arctic terns. The birds won't be able to make the migration again because there are no fish left for them in the ocean. In fact, these birds may not even make it to their destination this last time, without perishing first. 

Franny is a disturbed individual. Her father left her mom very early in their relationship and her mom has no contact with any of her family. Franny's mother has always had a strong urge to "wander" and Franny was born with that urge, also, A ten year old Franny leaves home for just a few days and when she returns, her mother is gone. Franny spends years looking for her mother and this search haunts her whether she is awake or asleep. Franny has very traumatic dreams, sleepwalks, and hallucinates. And now Franny is wandering one last time, following the Arctic terns. 

As she travels after the birds, on a fishing vessel, with a crew that knows this is their last haul, Franny writes letters to her husband. She's already written many letters and has kept them all. Franny's past is a mystery and her crewmates are suspicious of Franny and her true mission. Franny's sadness and sense of doom is so prevalent that I had no doubt that Franny was looking for her end. I loved the writing of this story even though it filled me with such sadness and a feeling of hopelessness. This story is about a woman's loss, other people's losses, and our losses. 

Thank you to Flatiron Books and NetGalley for this ARC.

Bring out your napkins! You may possibly haven’t read something so heart wrenching, extremely emotional, powerful, dark, nostalgic, depressive, tear jerking, sad for a long time and its powerful reality hits like a slap against your cheeks!

After your reading, you gotta need a strong drink, lay down to gather yourself together and breathe in and out several times because you’re truly shaken to your cores. This is so effective, strong and soul crushing, earth shattering kind of journey! You gotta be mentally and physically intact before getting your ticket to his adventure and getting rid of your second thoughts before you go blind and dive into!

This story is told by Franny Stone, who seems like tarnished, damaged soul, keeping dark secrets, a quiet brilliant wanderer who truly has no idea what she is doing with her life and how to treat herself fairly. She is mentally lost and each destination she takes gives her a life purpose for taking a new adventure and procrastinating to face with her own life’s realities.

Her new mission is compelling: she has to go to Greenland to find the world’s lost flock of Artic terns to follow them throughout their final migration which forces her convince to a half-mad captain Saghani to take her to his ship to reach her destination.

She finds herself in a ship of different crew- a group of broken people who lost their way throughout the years, fighting with their own past demons and resentments. It seems like seeing the results of seven deadly sins and instead of John Doe, apocalypse threatens the nearly 80 percent of the population: Now human’s pride and hunger for greed starts paying the price! The fishless oceans and extinction of animals are the new life normal.

Reading this reminded me the last standing orchestra members of Titanic: even though they know they’re going to die and there is no hope left, they keep playing till the end because the power of music is only thing give them a real purpose!

It’s a heart wrenching story about loss, grief, exhaustion and dark journey to the human soul! Normally I don’t like to read extra dark, suffocating, soul shaking stories but this is absolutely unique, a cold shower for your mind and awakening warning for you to take closer look to your own life story.

I cared about Franny a lot during my read and I liked to read her struggling story and her emotional letters to her husband and conclusion of her adventure. Well-crafted characters, great world building and moving, phenomenal story-telling mesmerized me so I had no choice but to give five blazing stars!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for sharing this remarkable ARC with me in exchange my honest review. And congratulations to Charlotte Mc Conaghy for creating such a powerful story.

Where to begin? This book deals with so many story lines Foremost is climate change and industrialization, which result in destruction of the world man was privileged to inherit. Family, the loss and search for it and the importance of it for one’s own identity. The fishing industry- the diverse men who do it, their love for the sea,the rigors of the life they willingly choose and don’t want to relinquish,the dangers involved( there are scenes that call to mind the movie THE PERFECT STORM). A love story-strange, filled as most are with heartbreaking scenes of deep loss and subsequent redemption. The book starts slowly and initially at least for this reader, quite confusingly. Franny Lynch, nee Stone ,is the main complex character and narrator. It hops around chronologically,which normally turns me off, but in this case left me with anticipation for the full story.It all comes together in the final chapters, and if you can read them unemotionally, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din!! Since climate change plays such a major part in the book I’ll close with part of a letter I received from my cousin in this time of the pandemic-he is not the author.
“Il mondo la sua vita ed è bellissimo. Mette solo gli esseri umani in gabbie.Penso che ci stia inviando un messaggio:”non sei necessario. L’aria, la terra, l’acqua e il cielo senza di te stanno bene. Quando tornate, ricordate che siete i miei ospiti.Non i miei padroni”. Translated:
The world continues its life and it is beautiful. Put only the human beings in cages. I think that the world is sending us a message:” you are not necessary. The air, the earth and the sky do well without you. When you return, remember that you are my guests not my bosses..

Migrations is a beautifully written, heartbreaking book. There are glimpses of Franny's past sprinkled throughout the book and it was always enough to make you want more, but never too much to distract you from the present storyline. I enjoyed how Franny's relationship with the Saghani crew slowly evolved. Migrations is definitely a book that will stay with me for a long time and I look forward to reading more by Charlotte McConaghy.

This book. Like the birds its protagoniste is so determined to follow, it soars. Consider this sentence on the novel's second page: "The world around her has changed just a little, or a lot." Reading this novel in the midst of an actual pandemic gives it that much more gravity. But it needed no help in that, with or without the hovering of coronavirus. The prose is achingly gorgeous: "I wandered. Through cobbled streets or into paddocks, where long grass whispered hish as I passed between." The slow emergence of our main character, Franny, how the author lifts veil after veil to reveal her character, made me physically ache for her, while the author's attention to language makes the narrative that much more poetic, that much more enthralling. The laser-focus on nature, in all senses of the word, gives the book both a timeless and timely theme. I loved everything, every aching sentence, of this debut novel. 

[I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

This book is set in a world in the (hopefully distant future) when animals have essentially become extinct. Humanity has overfished, global warming has messed with the ecosystems and only one last species of birds is left on earth. McConaghy sets the scene in this terrifying future and then drops in unlikely and broken protagonists attempting a quest they are likely to fail. And yet, I rooted for them every step of the way.

I flew through this book, trying to piece together the puzzle of each character's life. There's a lot of jumping between timelines and locations but it lead to a nice reveal that left me satisfied once I reached the final few pages.

What a stunning and atmospheric book. One part cautionary tale, one part literary thriller. I could not get through this book fast enough to better understand the complexities of the characters while at the same time wishing it wouldn’t end. The writing was absolutely incredible and the story well researched. I cannot wait to read more from this author!

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for a copy of this book. I will be sharing my full review on my blog closer to the publishing date.

An absolute masterpiece. Breathtaking and heartbreaking, a character study that was as riveting as any plot-driven novel I’ve ever read. Franny will live with me for a very long time; I am blown away.

This book is an absolutely stunning (US) debut for the author. This story is set in the (not so) distant future where all wildlife is on the edge of full extinction. We follow the narrator, a woman full of love, heartache, and mystery, as she tracks the last known terns on a very long migration. The relationships she forms with the band of "misfit" crew on the ship she finds to take her on the journey is so interesting, and the love story with her husband is beautiful. The writing in this novel just carried me away - it was descriptive but not cumbersome - and I couldn't help but see a piece of me in Franny, and left with a renewed awareness of our planet at risk. Many thanks to the author and publisher and Netgalley for the advanced read (all opinions are my own). I absolutely loved this book.

There are times that a novel will make me laugh out loud. There are others that will make me cry. But I don’t ever remember a novel make me audibly gasp. As in “gasp so you need to stop reading, stand up, and walk around for a while”. That is not until “Migrations” by Charlotte McConaghy. What a remarkable book by a new super talent making her 1st forray into adult literary fiction.

I will always remember that I read “Migrations” at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. We are living in times where we clearly see the results of what we have wrought. “Migrations” is set in the not-too-distant future when flora and particularly fauna are disappearing at an ever more alarming rate. Scientists continue to argue about how to best stem the tide. Protests abound, some violent. Enter Franny, a most remarkable protagonist. Her past has made her uniquely suited to play a key role.

There’s the ice-cold sea and the Arctic terns – the wonderful, wondrous Arctic terns. "Migrations" is much more than an apocalyptic adventure novel. It is deeply touching as the lives of the characters slowly unfold. There are deep themes of abandonment and commitment, bravery and fear. Please read "Migrations”. You may gasp.

Thanks to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for the eARC.

What a stunning, melancholy, visceral book. A young woman, with a wandering soul in search of meaning in her life coincides with her study of the migration of the Arctic tern. The atmospheric writing is amazing and there is enough unspoken secrets to keep you immersed.

This book will touch your soul.