A review by cmoo053
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

4.0

All thoughts on this need to be prefaced with the understanding that I have a very high tolerance for plotlessness in novel. Sea Monsters is exactly that, essentially plotless. A teenage girl decides to run away to the coast in Mexico, with a boy she barely knows. What happens to her there, or what doesn’t really happen, is not the point. Aridjis is a deeply poetic writer. This is a novel full of beautiful description, and astute observation of both people and the natural world. Although many of the things observed or analysed turn out to be nothing, this is the beauty of this novel. It is about the pursuit of magic in this world, and just as the illusion of one trick dissolves, another appears before us. In the end, if we find the magic in the moments we live, it doesn’t matter how much of it is real or not. I was entranced.