fiction
Franny lives in a future world where the animals of Earth
are mostly extinct due to human carelessness.
Fish are hard to find in the sea and very few birds still take to the
skies. She has an innate need for
adventure and travel, never able to stay in one place for very long. She is passionately
studying the migrations of the last Arctic Terns from the northern end of the
globe to the southern end and manages to talk her way onto a desperate fishing
vessel heading south. But Franny has a mysterious past. She has been long-separated
from her husband, a famous ornithologist.
It started slowly. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it but
decided to stick with it due a good friend’s recommendation. Migrations
definitely has a slower pace than I normally like to read. But the story was
well-built and the mystery of Franny herself pulled me through the novel.
Charlotte McConaghy hopped between Franny’s current and past, revealing new
bits of information about her little by little. She would drop an interesting
tidbit and then the reader would wonder about it for many chapters before a background
passage would solve the mystery.
McConaghy’s world building was clear and I often felt cold
while reading about the frozen environments in which Franny and the crew
resided. I could practically smell the saltwater on the ship. As a character,
Franny had extreme aspects. Early on, she explained that she had inherited her
need to keep moving. She was impulsive, brave, stupid, careless, lonely,
obsessive, and resilient. I disliked her much of the time, not yet
understanding her motivations, but then she would do something honorable and
worm her way into my good graces. It is a story centered around guilt caused by death and destruction.
The narrator, Barrie Kreinik, was spectacular with wonderful voice acting and an astounding vocal repertoire including a ton of accents. A+!
No comments:
Post a Comment