Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Migrations

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

142 reviews

marykatpat's review

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adventurous dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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ladynocturnal's review

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adventurous dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A beautiful story of human connection and finding your place in the world. I loved the characters and writing.

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hanny_25's review

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes

4.5

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zas9's review

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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jourdanicus's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Lovely writing, and I really enjoyed the audio. Frannie... Not the most likeable character, and such a well written example of such. I loved the way the narrative went back and forth in time, it was very smoothly and even at times poetically done.

Climate change, extinction, suicidal ideation, loss... All very dark themes, yes, but woven together so, so well in this book, and I can forgive the darkness for its ending

on a note of hope

. I don't think the themes were handled with cynicism at all which I really appreciate.

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amreading17's review

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adventurous dark hopeful informative inspiring sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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hannahalane's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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errie's review against another edition

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challenging reflective

4.0

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agavemonster's review

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dark medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.25

A facile, hamfisted melodrama with a self-absorbed narrator who only pauses between absurdly violent and self-destructive actions to faint dramatically and allow every other character to rescue her. The depiction of disappearing wild nature is reduced to a motif in the protagonist's tragic life story; nature on its own terms separate from the protagonist's personal drama is not respected, is not valued, and does not appear. That's what made me angriest of all about this book. Spoilers throughout this review.

The interminable first-person present tense, even in flashbacks, traps us without reprieve in Franny's head, a place that frankly sucks. She's devoted to her mission to follow the Arctic terns as they migrate from Arctic to Antarctic due to a promise she made to her husband, but she doesn't seem to care about the birds—their biology, the role they play in the ecosystem, their alien-ness and fundamental unlikeness to humans—aside from the way they make her feel free and remind her of her love for her husband. Characters are crudely sketched paper dolls who exist first as a quirky group of misfits for Franny to play found-family Barbie house with, then as a series of priest-cum-sinners who hear her confessions and immediately give her theirs as if reading off cue cards. And the characterization of these people is just ridiculous. A rough-and-tumble crew of the last fishermen in the world play Trivial Pursuit as a group at the pub and cook molecular-gastronomy food on board their vessel? Franny's grandmother, an unsmiling Australian rancher who shoots their pet donkey in the head after fatally injuring it, has this to say when Franny screams at her: "Things don't always take the shape you want them to, kid, and we gotta learn to endure that with a bit of grace"? Facebook wine mom Rachel Hollis shit.

Time after time after time, characters sacrifice for Franny, save her from sleepwalking over the side of the ship, hold her as she pounds on their chest and collapses into sobs, and murmur over how much deeper her pain is than anyone else's. To top it off, she's always the most specialest princess who saves the day (finds fresh water for the ship when they're on their last legs, conducts TWO separate cold-water drowning rescues, knows how to work the AED on an unconscious crewmember when no one else does even though they're professional sailors who have presumably been trained to use every tool on the vessel) and who makes deep emotional connections with everyone that starts off hating her but now loves her while simultaneously being shut-off and damaged.

The angsty violence done by Franny or to her is a substitute for any real inward or outward emotional development. "I can hardly feel my body as I move for the door. It's cold outside and I hardly know it, and before I close the door behind me I hear Blue ask, 'Did we upset her?' and Anik's voice replying 'Something darker did that,' and I'm walking for the hills and shore and sea. I take off all my clothes and wade out into the icy water and the pain is immense and also nothing nothing nothing." She throws up everywhere, she ties her wrists to the bedpost at least 4 separate times so she won't sleepwalk, she gets slashed up on the rocks by the ocean, she cuts herself with a toothbrush shiv in prison, she walks into freezing water and almost dies again and again—both out of suicidality and just for fun. The heavily telegraphed secrets of her dark past pile up like Jenga pieces yet fail to add up to any meaningful message or character arc. The husband she's been writing letters to (who creepily stalks her at her workplace and home as the start of their "love story", although of course this is played as romance) is actually dead, in a drunk-driving car wreck caused by her lack of attention due to her astonishment and subsequent suicidality on seeing a snowy owl, believed to be extinct; she goes to prison for three years after confessing to the "murder" of both her husband and the lady who was in the other car, and is beaten to the point of hospitalization in prison; the husband dies shortly after the miscarriage of their daughter; the birth of the daughter was meant to be a promise of presence and devotion to a new life after giving up on tracking down her mother; her mother didn't just disappear when Franny came home after a childish running-away at 10, she hanged herself. Hell, even the motif of Franny and her mother being connected by the curse/blessing of their shared nature as "wanderers" wasn't explored in enough depth, and I was still sick of it by the end!

The prose is airport-paperback banal. Words are chosen without thought for their meaning or their place in a sentence. An occasional lovely image appears—weeping over a photo of her lost family, "One of [my tears] drops onto the photo, distorting my grandmother's face, drowning her. I wipe it off so she can breathe again"—but the clumsy, melodramatic prose gets in its own way again and again. "I feel that deep and terrible binding for what it is, I know its face and its name, and it's not a binding at all, but love, and maybe that's the same kind of thing after all."

Finally: The vaunted strength of this book, its exploration of a world ruined by humanity, is its shameful downfall. Eighty percent of animals are extinct, but the disastrously changed climate that caused this mass extinction seems not to have affected the actual landscape (no mention of wildfires, droughts, flooding, political instability, climate refugees, coastal cities destroyed by rising sea levels?). A world without wild animals would be unimaginably impoverished and would look drastically different than it does today, but the actual ramifications of mass extinction on both culture and ecology are not considered (plants are more affected by climate change than animals because they can't move under their own power to new areas... the disappearance of insects would be far more noticeable than the disappearance of wolves etc and cause far more ecological havoc... livestock and domestic pets are still present aplenty and no one seems to have changed their relationship to animals or whether pets are worth feeding as every other living thing dies...).

The actual biology of endangerment and extinction makes basically no appearance in this book. All the smart scientists at the anti-extinction facility are trying to get captive terns to eat grass seeds from "a species of plant that will withstand inclement weather and grow on most continents" instead of fish, and this is presented as a practical idea, and the smart ornithologist husband argues that Arctic terns are the most resilient to extinction "because of their practice in flying farther than others." Wtf???? Animals with long migrations are the MOST SUSCEPTIBLE TO EXTINCTION because the whole migration route and both wintering and summering grounds have to remain intact! Crows literally go extinct in this book before Arctic terns do, as if crows aren't one of the most well-adapted commensal species! Another idiotically wrong bit: The central motif of the book, migration, isn't a desperate escape by an animal fleeing; it's traveling from home to home by roads it and its species have traveled for thousands and millions of years. The author's framing of Franny's compulsive, self-destructive escaping as a "migration" that's "in her nature" is completely wrongheaded.

Most transparently of all, an environmental protestor sees Franny disembarking from the fishing vessel, confronts her for her complicity in destroying the ocean, and attempts to rape her as punishment. She stabs him in the neck and flees (but not before passing out in the captain's arms as he comes to rescue her, of course), which triggers the second half of the book when the ship is on the run from both the murder and the newly enacted complete fishing ban. Why would a book that's ostensibly about conservation of the natural world make one of its only villains an environmental activist? The answer: because it's not about conserving nature, the beauty of wild places, or the relationship between humans and the earth. It's a knockoff Sharp Objects/Big Little Lies/Limetown with birds instead of journalism, or whatever.

The 1.25 stars is for the occasional moment of loveliness in the prose and that I got to think about terns and boats a lot while reading this book.

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ebrum's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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