Aridjis' writing is dreamy in a way that I love, not quite surreal, certainly not magical realist, just... lulling the way that waves can be, if not for our protagonist. Mexico City is a star character in this story, and I'm a bit biased as I delighted in recognizing particular building characters as neighbors in my chosen adopted neighborhood in DF. I also greatly appreciate the reclamation of the bildungsroman, and how deftly literary reference and approachability were interwoven. I do think both the narrative and development lost a little cohesion towards the end, but it might be that world events changed my ability to immerse myself in the feeling of the story. Still enjoyed it and will look for more from this author. ( )

I liked this as I was reading it, its lyrical, short and dreamlike. While the blurb about running away to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs is what attracted me to the book in the first place the plot is really pretty negligible, its more about young love and impulsive behaviour. I'm finding it hard to remember a whole lot about it now. ( )

The language of this novel is beautiful. So the reading experiences was pleasant. But the plot is not too exciting or appealing: A teenager runs away from her city home to lodge in a hammock on a faraway beach to pursue.....something -- a dream, a treasure, something out of the ordinary. She basically had a long vacation at the beach doing nothing while enjoying a fling with a stranger. The majority of the book focused on how she lounged at the beach doing nothing. There is also a significant portion of the book that described the girl's life in the city, which involved a lot of hanging out with boys, observing various strangers, and reading poetry. Then her father finally tracked down this missing daughter, and she returned home to the city with dad. I can see the novel's theme is about discontentment with life and pursuit of what is beyond the horizon, but I think running away from home to vacation on the beach with money earned by parents is a very irresponsible behavior for teenagers. If the language were not so beautiful, I would have quit this book halfway.

To get a sense of the novel's language, here are some sentences and phrases I liked:

" Someone once said that the dream is the aquarium of the night, but to my mind night was the aquarium of the dream, with our visions framed within it."

"To imagine travel is probably better than actually traveling since no journey can ever satisfy human desire; as soon as one sets out, fantasies get tangled in the rigging and dark birds of doubt begin their circling overhead."

“tall weeds that rose around the house like the soil’s unbrushed hair”
( )

That just did not pay off. I was kinda behind the ennui for a while, but it didn't really go anywhere. Baffled by the father's overindulgent monologue at the end. The home metaphors seemed a bit heavy handed. Ah well. ( )

Winner of this year's Pen Faulkner Award, Sea Monsters is the memoir- like story of a 17 year old Luisa, living in Mexico City in the late 80's. She attends a boarding school where rich kids have a bodyguard pick them up at the end of the day. She's not one of them but she is bright and her teachers know it, giving her special books to read and topics to explore. She is near graduation and looking for adventure since ,"There is no woodworm in the door hinges, someone once said, a good motto for any age, even at seventeen, and I knew it was wise to keep everything in motion." She decides to run away with Tomas, her latest infatuation, in search of dwarfs that have recently run away from the visiting Ukrainian Circus, (true historical event). She meets Tomas at a party and decides , "that the portrait from up close was even better than from afar: grayish eyes and tufts of hair in all directions, and a gap between the front teeth, surely excellent for whistling. He seemed older than me, by two or three years, and was unusually pale, not in the synthetic manner of the blond stars of Televisa but rather like a güerito de rancho. His face was very round, almost lunar, and more than anything he reminded me of someone handsome I’d once seen in a music video, not the lead singer but someone in the periphery, on a parallel plane."
Their journey lands them in the costal town of Zipolite, where she tires of Tomas in favor of a more exotic sand castle builder whom she refers to as a merman. The plot is not important here. It is the language and imagery that make the novel interesting, that and the appreciation of a time and place unfamiliar to most. The author's descriptions of the waves and the landscapes demonstrate her poetic skills.
The Atlantic sums it up: "the novel’s satisfactions come not from character growth or plot resolution, but from the evoking of emotion through symbols. As Luisa wanders through Zipolite, she returns to a handful of images: iguanas, breaking waves, shipwrecks, the island of Kythera, an ancient Greek predictive device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Each one shifts in meaning, like the seashells, and tracking their evolving significance pulls readers deep into the novel’s interpretive project."
Some lines:
Sometimes I would see Tomás walk past, his shadow easy to pluck out from the rest, and although he kept a certain distance I recognized him instantly, tall and slender with a jaunty gait, like a puppet of wood and cloth slipped over a giant hand.

Remember, he’d say, society is like a fish tank, only less beautiful to watch. The structure is not so different, however: here we have the shy fish who spend their lives hiding between the rocks, missing out on moments both important and trivial, then the gregarious types who crisscross the water in search of company or adventure, always on the move without knowing where they’re headed, and then the curious ones who hover close to the surface, first in line for food but also first should any hand or paw plunge in.

His face was from another continent and another era, with hooded wide-set eyes and thick lips and sloping eyebrows. And even more like my favorite actor, Peter Lorre, his expression could go within seconds from gentle to glowering to broken and forlorn, the face of someone historically haunted, a face that seemed to carry in it several chapters of European history.

El Pitufo, a coke dealer who wrote poetry; people listened to him recite his latest poems in exchange for free samples, and the more they consumed, the better his poetry sounded to their ears. He longed to be taken seriously, but when people saw him all they could think of was fine white lines.

El Nueve was the nocturnal reply to the daylight hours, the place that drew those of us who preferred European moonlight to the Mexican sun. Located halfway down Londres in the Zona Rosa, it played dark wave, post punk, and industrial, often courtesy of its Scottish DJ, an angular Goth who wore pointy boots and a black suede tassel jacket.

There are two kinds of romantics, my older cousin had explained, the kind who is constantly falling in love and simply needs a person into whom they can pour every thought, dream, and project, and the kind of romantic who remains alone, waiting and waiting for the right person to arrive, a person who may not even exist. It was too early to know which kind I would be. ( )