Olive Fellows (abookolive)'s Reviews > Migrations

I do not understand the praise this book is getting.

It’s compared to Station Eleven because, as you find out naturally as the book progresses, it is set in a world (possibly our own future) in which animal and plant life is all but gone, at least in places inhabited by humans.

Our main character is Franny Lynch (nee Stone). She’s on a mission to get aboard a fishing vessel since it’s the only way she thinks she’ll be able to achieve her last goal in life: follow the last remaining colony of Arctic terns, sleek white birds with black caps, on their final migration. She manages to talk her way onto the Saghani and gets a crash course on how to survive at sea from the boat’s crew.

There are just as many flashbacks as there are scenes in the present. We’re hopping around to various points in Franny’s life which gets very confusing even though we’re given the years in which these scenes happen. It’s confusing because of all the bouncing around and because just about everything you start off believing about Franny turns out to be untrue.

Franny might be the most boring unreliable narrator I’ve ever experienced. We’re told that she wanders and the author beats you about the head with the fact that it’s *in her blood.* It’s just part of her *nature* that she abandons places and therefore people in order to go off and do...what, exactly? Who knows.

Franny sleepwalks and knows that she can become violent and behave recklessly when she does so, but there’s no information about how long she’s had this condition or if it was induced by any kind of stressful or traumatic situation. Nor does she ever seek help for it. She’s clearly not well - she basically starts off the book telling us she’s suicidal, but it’s not until the very end of the book that you start to get a sense of why she might feel that way.

Because this author wanted the shock factor at the end of the book, she wrote a character who’s tortured for the sake of being tortured for the first three quarters. She crammed all the truth - the realities of Franny’s life - at the back end of the book and used an unreliable narrator to excuse that.

Nothing about this book was executed well, but what had me seething was the unforgivably lazy worldbuilding. As an author, you cannot, and I mean CANNOT, just say that this world is now devoid of most animal and plant life without discussing the cataclysmic effect it would have. Nothing on Earth would be the same. You can’t just flippantly say that the world’s forests are gone and not comment on what this means! What’s the world’s human population now? How are crops growing? How far advanced is global warming? How high are sea levels? Does the change in sea levels have an impact on currents and the navigation of this fishing vessel?

To ignore those HUGE issues in favor of trying to make the reader feel an emotional connection with a deluded liar is downright unacceptable to me. I am livid at this publisher for promoting the blatant lie that this book is similar to Station Eleven. Say what you will about the writing in Station Eleven (I liked it, but I know others didn’t), but there was a whole well-thought out world in that book.

This book is proof that publishers and readers go to mush for tortured characters and emotionally manipulative stories regardless of whether they’re actually good. Franny and this book can go ahead and migrate out of my life.