A review by kailinmooney
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

4.0

I really really enjoyed this book, the writing was fantastic, but the last 3 pages made me narrow my eyes and scrunch my nose, which tragically turned my five star rating into a 4.5.

This book was a sloooow one for me, I didn’t really know where some plot points were going, but I didn’t care that much- I was along for the atmospheric ride. This book was quiet, subtle, cold, and sad. It made me feel a lot of things in very gentle strokes. It is filled with an aching loneliness.

We follow Franny while jumping between many different chapters of her life, which is set in a near-future dystopian climate crisis earth where pretty much everything wild is extinct. Franny is searching for connection and meaning in a life where she has felt mostly untethered, which leads her to seek out the migration of the final arctic terns. She ends up on a ship with a crew of fishermen (queue obvious moral quandaries about killing the few remaining fish in a dying ocean). All the while we flash back into multiple different time periods that start to unravel Franny’s forlorn and tragic backstory with slivers of hope to moor us.