27 Jan / Fathoms: The World in the Whale By Rebecca Giggs [in Booklist]
For much of the 12 hours here, prolific Shiromi Arserio’s crisp-yet-soft, melodic-but-never-sing-songy voice seems just right for narrating Australian journalist Rebecca Giggs’ stupendous cetacean debut. The London native’s aural transfer to Down Under is mostly convincing, but when she moves beyond English, her fluency stumbles noticeably as she garbles, for example, through Korean and even familiar Japanese words, manga and sakura.
Lazy narration glitches aside, Giggs’ meticulous homage to whales – embellished with evolutionary anthropology, interactive history, ecological investigations, deeply personal journeys, and more – is an illuminating experience regardless of format. Abundant fascinating facts thrill and chill: whale “songs” are better described as poetry, whale hunting is at least 8,000 years old, mothers’ milk is pink, the unfortunate ingestion of a full greenhouse is just one instance of grievous human disruption, and blubber is an exacting barometer of man’s increasing toxicity.
Beyond the doom and gloom, however, Giggs’ admonishments and encouragements to save the whale (again) in order to save ourselves and our world provide surprising rays of hope in which every reader might bask, learn, commit, and help heal.
Review: “Media,” Booklist Online, January 26, 2021
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2020