Migrations (McConaghy) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Visceral and haunting… [and]a first-rate work of climate fiction…. This novel’s prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet’s landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates…. Migrations is a nervy and well-crafted novel, one that lingers long after its voyage is over.
New York Times Book Review


The beauty and the heartbreak of this novel is that it’s not preposterous. It feels true and affecting, elegiac and imminent…. The fractured timeline fills each chapter with suspense and surprises, parceled out so tantalizingly that it took disciplined willpower to keep from skipping down each page to see what happens…. Ultimately hopeful.
Washington Post


An aching and poignant book… often devastating in its depictions of grief… of living in a world that has changed catastrophically…. But it’s also a book about love, about trying to understand and accept the creatureliness that exists within our selves, and what it means to be a human animal, that we might better accommodate our own wildness within the world.
Guardian (UK)


A good nautical adventure…. Migrations moves at a fast, exciting clip, motored as much by love for "creatures that aren’t human" as by outrage at their destruction.
Wall Street Journal


Powerful…. Vibrant…. Unique…. McConaghy has a gift for sketching out enveloping, memorable characters using only the smallest of strokes…. Migrations, rather than struggle to convince readers of some plan of environmental action, instead puts humans in their place.
Los Angeles Times


Thrilling….  McConaghy creates a detailed portrait of a woman on the cusp of collapse, consumed with a world that is every bit as broken as she is.… In understanding how nature can heal us, McConaghy underlines why it urgently needs to be protected.
Time


[The] cunky chronicle of Franny Stone, a troubled woman who follows a flock of endangered Arctic terns…. While McConaghy’s plot is engaging, her writing can be a heavy-handed distraction…. Lovers of ornithology and intense drama will find what they need in this uneven tale.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) [A] thrillerlike dimension… [and] consummate blend of issue and portrait, warning and affirmation, this heartbreaking, lushly written work is highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


(Starred review) [T]ransfixing, gorgeously precise…. Some may find this darkly enrapturing work of ecofiction too heavily plotted, but all the violence, shock, and loss Franny navigates do aptly, and unnervingly, foreshadow a possible environmental apocalypse.
Booklist


Toggling back and forth in time and from place to place, the plot floats through gut-wrenching vignettes of Franny’s escapades, strung together like clues on a life-or-death scavenger hunt…. Prepare to mourn a bleak image of the future and to embrace an everlasting hope in Franny’s heroic example.
BookPage