Review
Author: Charlotte McConaghy
Reviewed by: SHA
Issue: March 2021
Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations was the Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of 2020 in Fiction, but I sense that the book will have mixed reactions. The author imagines that climate change is killing off the animal world. Enter Franny Stone, who has traveled to Greenland to electronically tag a few of what might be the last of the Arctic terns before they embark on their animal migration. That migration starts in their northern breeding grounds and runs to the southern summer on the Antarctica coast. Their round trip each year runs to 45-55,000 miles depending on the starting point, by far the longest migrations known in the animal kingdom. Franny plans to track them as they go and, needing a boat to take her, talks a reluctant Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, a purse seine herring boat, into taking her when she tells him that the terns will lead them to large schools of herring. Narrated in the first person by Franny, they sail away amid resentment by the crew, head south, and ultimately pick up signals from the terns. The occasional, brutal weather and details of the voyage are spaced with Franny's recollections of her troubled life of tragedies, estrangements, and run-ins with the law which have left their mark on her. She is a psychological case. The author parcels out, piece by piece, the principal elements of her life, her family, her husband (an ornithologist), and her incarceration, such that the suspense builds not only about the fate of the terns, but where and how Franny's "migration" will end. That the voyage is an improbable one is mostly (not entirely) overcome by the nature of Franny's life and her quest, the nature of her developing relationship with the crew, and by the mystery of Franny herself as the facts about her life become available.