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A review by kerridanskin
Archipelago by Monique Roffey
5.0
Archipelago is a really engaging mourning adventure. The author takes you along on the boat with Gavin, Océan, and Suzy almost immediately, slowly allows you to peek into their traumatic history, and then in one quick and brutal passage initiates you into the trauma with your own terrible loss as a reader. There you are thinking you are just sympathizing with this little family when Roffey just jabs your heart with a dagger and it gets very personal. I was shocked by my own grief and anger reading it. It was there that I started to get the point—that suffering touches us all, with no regard for our feelings or preferences, just as the ocean is noted to do in the novel. I should have known I wouldn’t be a mere witness to this story when I felt a bit seasick reading the first few chapters because Roffey’s descriptions of rough seas were so vivid they brought my own scary seafaring memories alive.
I appreciate Roffey’s handling of climate change in this book. Lately I feel like authors are including it, and all the dystopian feeling that go along with it, in a way that is aimed only at reminding readers that it is happening. This is very important, of course, but it was nice to see an author make a deeper point about it and use it to demonstrate something about the story and its characters, and about being a human in general. It allowed me to feel my climate grief and put it somewhere rather than just leaving me with it in my lap, which has been my experience at times with other novels that touch upon it. We need to both do whatever we can about climate change and process our relative powerlessness (as individuals) in the face of it. Roffey really respects her readers in fully articulating her art in that direction.
Rising up out of the bleakness of many aspects of this story is a message about letting go of attachments and continuing to move and live despite the loss all around us and our smallness in the face of it. There is no “it’s all going to be OK” element to this, just a beautifully grounded sense that this is what we do, what we must do.
I appreciate Roffey’s handling of climate change in this book. Lately I feel like authors are including it, and all the dystopian feeling that go along with it, in a way that is aimed only at reminding readers that it is happening. This is very important, of course, but it was nice to see an author make a deeper point about it and use it to demonstrate something about the story and its characters, and about being a human in general. It allowed me to feel my climate grief and put it somewhere rather than just leaving me with it in my lap, which has been my experience at times with other novels that touch upon it. We need to both do whatever we can about climate change and process our relative powerlessness (as individuals) in the face of it. Roffey really respects her readers in fully articulating her art in that direction.
Rising up out of the bleakness of many aspects of this story is a message about letting go of attachments and continuing to move and live despite the loss all around us and our smallness in the face of it. There is no “it’s all going to be OK” element to this, just a beautifully grounded sense that this is what we do, what we must do.