Starred review from September 30, 2024
In this stunning and original debut, writer and musician Caffall draws links between hereditary illness and the fates of marine life in collapsing ecosystems. For 200 years, Caffall’s family has passed down polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a chronic condition whose sufferers have an average life expectancy of 50 years. The author first learned of the “Caffall Curse” at nine years old, when the disease was starting to kill her father. At the same time, she was learning about the environmental decay affecting crabs and eels in the Long Island Sound, where her family often vacationed. In the present, a middle-aged Caffall reflects on her complicated feelings about parenthood, knowing she may have passed PKD on to her son. When the two of them take a trip to an island off the coast of Maine, Caffall has a seizure. After being rescued by the Coast Guard, she reflects on the algae threatening lobster and humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine, which gives the animals symptoms similar to those brought on by PKD. While the memoir’s conceit might feel forced in lesser hands, Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership. Agent: Julia Lord, Julia Lord Literary.
Starred review from November 1, 2024
Caffall brings readers to a favorite place, Monhegan Island, in the Gulf of Maine, "the world's fastest-warming marine ecosystem." As she shares her wonder over the might and beauty of the ocean and her deep concern for its future, inherited from her mother, she also describes the as-yet-incurable genetic kidney disorder inherited from her father, polycystic kidney disease, as "a rising sea under the skin." This nexus between ocean and human shapes Whiting Award-winner Caffall's ardently researched, candid, dramatic, and lyrical mix of science and memoir. A musician as well as a writer, Caffall has composed a narrative symphonic in its themes, highs and lows, flow, and keys both major and minor. She parallels the miraculous dynamics that sustain life in the seas and in the human body, and marks threats to both. Her passionate inquiry encompasses the history of the bestiary, why we struggle to fully recognize and confront ecocollapse, and the nature and function of mourning as she chronicles the pain of losing family members and facing her own health challenges, all while raising a valiant son who may have inherited the same malady. This intricate, delving, and affecting rhapsody to the glory of the seas and our capacity for love, learning, and transformation sings with sorrow, awe, courage, and hope.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from January 1, 2025
A memoir of illness, the author's and the planet's. Caffall suffers from a congenital disorder, polycystic kidney disease, that, she writes, "killed most of my family before they reached fifty." With that likelihood of a death sentence upon her, a single mother with a difficult mother of her own, she turns to the ocean and its "threatened sea creatures," gathering from her studies "a bestiary...a list of fish that will teach me how to live." Without self-importance or sentimentality, she likens each aspect of her illness, physical and psychological, to the decline of the world's health. "Our global marine ecosystem works not dissimilarly from the circulatory system in the human body," she writes, and in that regard that ecosystem is in imminent danger of shutting down: The Gulf of Maine, her central point of reference, is warming rapidly enough that the waters are being invaded by creatures from tropical waters, while the Arctic Ocean is becoming a mere extension of the Atlantic, no longer capped in ice. Caffall writes with the observant care of a natural historian in the vein of a latter-day Rachel Carson: She notes here that acid rain is linked to the rise in red tides, which jeopardize the food chain all the way up to seals and whales, and that the poisons brought into the oceans from industrial farms and metropolitan sewage rob the waters of oxygen and suffocate creatures such as the lobster--a process marked, she writes, by "the same things that overwhelm a body when kidneys no longer filter blood properly." Whirlpools, bioluminescence, the Gulf Stream, barnacles, and sharks--all figure in Caffall's graceful and understandably elegiac pages and her closing benediction: that in the mystery and miracle of life "lies all that can save you and the world entire." A future classic of nature writing--if, that is, there is a future.
COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.