“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here. . . Once when the animals were going, really and truly, and not just in warnings of dark futures, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. . . Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything.” – Franny Stone
Visceral. I swear I could feel the cold, smell the sea, sense the dead silence in the forest and sky, and watch the emptying surf crash on the rocks in agony, nearly empty of precious marine life. All fauna and marine life hunted and fished to the edge of extinction by greed and callousness. Yes, it is a dark and depressing world, but the author has the gift to keep the reader reading and reading. In my case, long into the night to finish the book in one sitting,
Migrations sucked me into a world that felt far less like the future and more like an ominous vision of our real-time immediate future. Our own world tilting out-of-control; written a split-second before Covid-19 arrived, escalating heat waves that baked billions of seashore marine life, severe drought, and unstoppable forest fires that have lead to unmerciful deaths and destruction.
In a frozen Artic wilderness, Franny Stone risks life and limb, alone, scrambling along icy cliffs. Her plan, tag three of the few remaining Artic terns about to take flight, for what well may be their last annual migration to Antarctica. The prologue is heavy with a sense of loss, despair, and hopelessness. Franny, in a world seemly without hope, desperately needs to know if these last birds survive. She has an affinity for the birds. She is a thalassophile, a person magnetically attracted to the ocean. Someone feeling trapped on land. Someone who has a spiritual connection to the water. Someone who needs to be in the water to feel complete and free.
Tracking her three Artic terns flying over the earth’s waterways requires a seafaring vessel. Mired in the hopelessness of their own futures, with the seas void of sustainable sources of income, no shipowner is willing to help a lady’s phrenetic need to track a small flock of birds across the globe. No one until she meets the cryptic Captain Enis Malone and the motley seafaring crew of the Saghani.
The Saghani sets sail through the high seas the boat was never built to traverse following the electronic signal of the Artic terns. As drama unfolds among the captain, Franny, and the experienced crew, we are flipped backward through time to snippets of Franny’s past; a past that seems like ground-hog-day. Times that begin with promise of love and inclusiveness that end with Franny running away.
The story is dark but the reader needs to know how it all ends for Franny, the crew and Captain Enis. Will learning the fate of the birds provide a glimpse of promise that there is still hope left in the world? Can Enis and Franny free themselves from their internal bondage? The ending will surprise you.
Personally, the book affected me deeply. Will we destroy our own world through indifference and misuse of resources? Is there hope for our children’s children?
Covid-19 Matters
As I try to form my thoughts here, I am reminded of Ian Strachan’s children’s book –The Boy in the Bubble. I can’t be the only person on the globe that’s chafing at the bit to get their hair cut and a hug from my best friends. Ya, I know. I could do those things. But you see, I am of the opinion that a longer life with my family outweighs looking good for the funeral director.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I live isolated on Alec Mountain. The only people I see regularly are the mail carrier and the garbage pickup crew. About every 2-3 weeks, I mask up and head to the grocery store.
In the mornings, when the weather permits, I build a tiny fire, plop my tush in my wooden glider, sip my morning coffee, and watch the sun rise. The birds are outrageously loud this year. It makes me feel better to be outside. I look around and realize that the natural world is going on just fine in spite of the pandemic.
I have my concerns and worries just like everyone else. There are family members serving their communities in the health care field to worry about. My son lives in Germany and recently had a serious crash on his bicycle requiring surgery and I can’t go to see him. My sister is in an Atlanta area nursing home where many residents and staff have Covid and a fair number of residents have died. I am her trustee and have been handling complicated financial transactions on her behalf standing in front of drive-up bank windows; the last time in the rain.
So where am I going with all this? I have come to the conclusion that my brain has been stunned and I just can’t stop my mental wanderings long enough to write reviews for my blog. I still read. I have read some very fascinating new fiction – pickup a copy of The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate. Stay tuned, I will be back in the near future.
My wildlife camera captures guests on those trails. Some delightful and others requiring some intervention. Imagine my surprise to recently capture images of an entire herd of cows that had broken loose from their pasture and some how climbed the mountain to enjoy my trails.
Please stay safe. Things will get better.I am sure of that for a fact.
Back with you soon.
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Tagged as Book Reviews, Covid19 comments, Itzey.blog, Mountain Life, Social Isolation