BookBrowse Review
BookBrowse
The author describes a future we do not want. But her bleak vision is only one element of this engrossing story. The novel is also a warm combination of a love story, a perilous journey, a dark back story that is only gradually revealed, echoes of classics (Moby Dick, Jules Verne and Hans Christian Andersen immediately come to mind, along with tales of orphans) and mesmerizing nature writing... Just as Flight Behavior changes the way its readers look at and think about butterflies, and The Overstory does that for trees, so does Migrations for birds (Deborah W)...continued
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(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
Media Reviews
Elle
[A] tantalizingly beautiful epic.
Harper's Bazaar
At a time when it feels like we’re at the end of the world, this novel about a different kind of end of the world serves as both catharsis and escape.
Literary Hub
Gorgeous…A personal reckoning that cuts right to the heart. This beautiful novel is an ode--if not an elegy--to an endangered planet and the people and places we love.
Los Angeles Times
“Powerful…Vibrant…Unique…If worry is the staple emotion that most climate fiction evokes in its readers,
Migrations — the novelistic equivalent of an energizing cold plunge — flutters off into more expansive territory…McConaghy has a gift for sketching out enveloping, memorable characters using only the smallest of strokes…
Migrations, rather than struggle to convince readers of some plan of environmental action, instead puts humans in their place.
Newsweek
An ode to our disappearing natural world.
The Guardian
An aching and poignant book, and one that’s pressing in its timeliness. It’s often devastating in its depictions of grief, especially the wider, harder to grasp grief of living in a world that has changed catastrophically…But it’s also a book about love, about trying to understand and accept the creatureliness that exists within our selves, and what it means to be a human animal, that we might better accommodate our own wildness within the world.
The New York Times Book Review
Visceral and haunting…As well as a first-rate work of climate fiction,
Migrations is also a clever reimagining of
Moby-Dick…This novel’s prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet’s landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates…
Migrations is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over.
The Wall Street Journal
A good nautical adventure…
Migrations moves at a fast, exciting clip, motored as much by love for ‘creatures that aren’t human’ as by outrage at their destruction.
The Washington Post
The beauty and the heartbreak of this novel is that it’s not preposterous. It feels true and affecting, elegiac and imminent...The fractured timeline fills each chapter with suspense and surprises, parceled out so tantalizingly that it took disciplined willpower to keep from skipping down each page to see what happens...In many ways, this is a story about grieving, an intimate tale of anguish set against the incalculable bereavements of climate change...Ultimately hopeful.
TIME
Thrilling…In piecing together who this mysterious protagonist really is, McConaghy creates a detailed portrait of a woman on the cusp of collapse, consumed with a world that is every bit as broken as she is.
Migrations offers a grim window into a future that doesn’t feel very removed from our own, which makes Franny’s voice all the more powerful. In understanding how nature can heal us, McConaghy underlines why it urgently needs to be protected.
Vogue
Suspenseful, atmospheric…As much a mystery as an odyssey.
Vulture
You can practically hear the glaciers cracking to pieces and the shrill yelps of the circling terns.
Maclean’s Magazine
An exceptional novel that is both elegy and page-turning thriller.
Shelf Awareness
At times devastating and, at others, surprisingly, undeniably hopeful…Brimming with stunning imagery and raw emotion,
Migrations is the incredible story of personal redemption, self-forgiveness and hope for the future in the face of a world on the brink of collapse.
Booklist (starred review)
Transfixing, gorgeously precise…[The] evocation of a world bereft of wildlife is piercing; Franny’s otherworldliness is captivating, and her extreme misadventures and anguished secrets are gripping.
Library Journal (starred review)
[
Migrations] could be taking place in two years or 20 years, but it could just as well be happening today…A consummate blend of issue and portrait, warning and affirmation, this heartbreaking, lushly written work is highly recommended.
Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World
Migrations is indeed about loss--but what makes it miraculous is that it is also about hope. Written in prose as gorgeous as the crystalline beauty of the Arctic,
Migrations is deeply moving, haunting, and, yes, important.
Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven
Migrations is as beautiful and as wrenching as anything I've ever read. This is an extraordinary novel by a wildly talented writer.
Geraldine Brooks, author of The Secret Chord and March
This novel is enchanting, but not in some safe, fairy-tale sense. Charlotte McConaghy has harnessed the rough magic that sears our souls. I recommend
Migrations with my whole heart.
Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild
An astounding meditation on love, trauma, and the cost of survival. A true force of a book that I read holding my breath from its start to its symphonic finish.
Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept
Migrations is a wonder. I read it in a gasp. There is hope in these pages; a balm for these troubled times. Charlotte McConaghy's words cut through to the bone.
Reader Reviews
Charla Wilson
Heartbreaking and terrifying! This book has almost five thousand 5 star reviews on Amazon, so I’m not sure if there is anything left for me to say. Although, it is such a sad story on many different levels, it is a great story that keeps you glued to I until the end. Franny, the ...
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Rosemary K.
Another World/Bleak, yet Haunting This book is mysterious; it is brilliantly written.
I was immediately intrigued by the initial basis--that animals are gradually disappearing. When the focus turned to birds, I was intrigued by the resultant soundless atmosphere that would remain...
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Donna Mc
An extraordinary read Franny is one with the sea and with birds. She lives in a world apart, deeply intense but also deeply damaged. This is a wonderful book, beautifully written. Its understanding and reverence of wildlife will resonate with any bird lover, and the ...
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CarolT
Unputdownable! I've found way too many highly rated books not nearly as good as their reviews. Migrations is exactly the opposite. One of the few books I've been unable to put down this year. Charlotte McConaghy is a writer to watch.
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Book Reviewed by:
In Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations, Franny follows the migration of the Arctic tern (sterna paradisaea). McConaghy's novel is set in a fictional future in which the bird is on the brink of extinction. Currently, Arctic terns are not in danger to such a degree, as there are still more than one million of them around the world, but their habitats are threatened by climate change.
