Migrations

Dystopic yet beautiful

Because of climate change and human interference, most animal life is extinct, with the birds and marine life teetering on extinction. Franny is on a quest to follow the last of the Atlantic terns, for special reasons of her own. She convinces a fishing vessel captain to allow her to come on board so she can accomplish this, even though their industry goes against every fiber of her being.
The story is told in interwoven vignettes of past and present. Achingly beautiful.

Story that is set in the near future, with the backdrop of how mankind has impacted the environment. There are no large mammals that exist, nor very many fish. And there are soon to be no birds, save for the arctic tern. We meet Franny Stone, the primary character, just as she is tagging a term in Greenland, near the Arctic Circle. She has actually tagged three terns, and will be able to follow them on her computer as they complete what scientists speculate will be one of the last of their kind’s migration from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica. The species flies this great distance, and searches for food along the way, fish, which are near extinction. Franny must catch a ride on a seagoing vessel in order to stay within RFID range of her terns. She identifies a fishing crew aboard the Saganny, which is also in docked in the same port city where she is, in Greenland, and convinces the captain she can lead him to fish for his commercial fishing crew. This is because of her tracking of the birds, which can point the way to the fish. The only catch, so to speak, is that Franny wants the captain, Enys, to follow the terns’ migration all the way to Antarctica. This would cover unfamiliar waters for the crew, but they take her on in search of the ultimate big catch. Along the way, Franny writes to her husband, Niall Lynch, who is a brilliant ornithologist and professor in Dublin, and later a researcher is Edinburgh, studying the impacts of global warming on birds. She had met him sitting in on one of his lectures, but left halfway through the first class, when the class was invited to study a stuffed specimen up close. She was repelled. But he was intrigued, as he had never had a student leave his class mid-lecture. So, they had a meet-cute story. But there was a lot of backstory to her growing up, which involved looking for her missing mother. Franny was trying to pinpoint why she was a wanderer, as she was restless, and also a sleep-walker and a nocturnal choker - was this a family trait? A hard-to-explain phenomenon, that her patient now-husband Niall was willing to over-look. To keep in touch, a Franny wrote many letters to Niall while away. Such as, on this research trip. It is not explained to the reader how the letters are not posted. After all, they are on a ship, away from port. But things are revealed, as she and Enys draw near to the migration feeding grounds in Antarctica. This is a book that invites the reader to imagine how the world would look, if animals, fowl or fish were no longer present. Very thought-provoking!

Not in the same as league as Wild Dark Shores - yet another slow starter that took too long to drawn you into the story. Also the theme of the extinction of wild animals was a bit too depressing for me.

Beautifully written

lovely and unexpected