Sea Monsters

A Novel

By: Chloe Aridjis

Narrated by: Justine Eyre

One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking - recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: She wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa's surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery". It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead". Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter.

A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

©2019 Chloe Aridjis (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

There’s not much of a plot

The writing is very poetic but if you like a story with a plot and resolution, this is not your story. This story follows a girl who runs away from home and goes to the beach, that’s pretty much what you get.

Beautiful book, alas read with vocal fry

In my humble opinion, this exquisitely written book was tragically misinterpreted by the professional reader's super-nasal voice and constant vocal fry—perhaps better suited to young adult fiction rather than a literary novel about a young adult. The printed version is wistful and poetic. The Audible version sounds weirdly, inappropriately whimsical. Just heartbreaking.