"The novel's brilliance lies in capturing so convincingly that state of adolescent restlessness... Aridjis's languid prose lets these images wash over the reader, unfurling in comma-rich sentences that beautifully render a state of inertia" -- Francesca Carington * Daily Telegraph *
"Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today" -- Garth Greenwell
"A mesmerising novel... Aridjis beautifully renders the perspective of a bored, intelligent, privileged teenage girl - a decadent, solipsistic daydream" -- Emily Rhodes * Financial Times *
"Self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea" -- Katy Waldman * New Yorker *
"Aridjis riffs like a poet, letting each image twist and grow into the next... The novel's strength lies in its ability to turn to the next magic trick, the next detail, the next sight. Those sights are all the more impressive when conjured solely from language. By opting out of fiction's conventional prioritization of plot or character development, Aridjis foregrounds her ability to develop images and metaphors. The result is seductive in its multiplicity. Mallarme would be proud" -- Lily Meyer * Atlantic *
"I love the way Chloe Aridjis creates her own worlds in prose, and I especially love how Sea Monsters has invented the world of adolescence and its reveries: violent and tender, logical and dreamlike - a twenty-first century essay disguised as a nineteenth-century fable" -- Adam Thirlwell
"The language is precise, strange, evocative and wise... Aridjis's novel poses far more questions than it answers, and it does so accurately and beautifully." -- RO Kwon * Guardian *
"Reading this angsty and atmospheric novel was like busting open my adolescent 1980s veins and mainlining the entire Joy Division catalog right into my bloodstream. Just gorgeous" -- Samantha Irby * Marie Claire *
"A surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments . . . Aridjis allows her narrative to swell and recede like the sea, along with Luisa's capacious imagination . . . Aridjis excels at writing a life lived in the borderlands between reality and fantasy... Moreover, the novel's precocious teenage narrative voice is replete with sentences of rare beauty and power. I may start reading it again at once" * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Eccentrically detailed...Aridjis scrambles your brain, not with high-modernist pyrotechnics but by the stealthier means of undermining the assumption that a novel's words exist to advance the story...You enjoy Luisa's company without ever being quite sure why she wants us around" -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
"Sea Monsters is destined to be a classic: a richly imaginative, reflective and mesmerising novel" -- Xiaolu Guo
"Aridjis's coming-of-age novel is rich in atmosphere, and there's an undeniable charm to its dreamlike narrative" -- Anthony Gardner * Mail on Sunday *
"A searingly hypnotic work, a dazzling tale of enchantment and disenchantment" -- Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water For Chocolate
"Intense and impressionistic, it seems to hang on in the air long after the last page." -- Rupert Thomson
"The prose is mesmerising with strange and beautiful observations" * Sunday Express *
"A dreamy, wandering tale of teenage ennui and searching, and the pull of the sea . . . Aridjis's sentences are luminescent and imagistic . . . A lovely, surreal novel" -- Julia Kastner * Shelf Awareness *
"Ethereal and ruminative . . . Brilliant in her ability to get inside the head of her young narrator, Aridjis skillfully renders a slightly zonked-out atmosphere of mystery and the mind of a young romantic, resulting in a strange and hypnotic novel." * Publishers Weekly *
"At once precise and impressionistic, [Sea Monsters] sympathetically navigates between dreams and disillusionment, while preserving intact its deeply beguiling spell" -- Stephanie Cross * The Lady *
"Sea Monsters is a treasure chest of Luisa's deftly curated visions" * BOMB Magazine *
"Aridjis draws the reader in with gorgeous and poignant descriptions of setting, essayistic digressions on history and art, and moody suggestions of violence. She's like a dreamier W. G. Sebald, or Baudelaire set to a soundtrack of Joy Division and the Cure. Further, there's a sense of playfulness in Aridjis that a lot of people trying to write this kind of fiction never achieve" * Southwest Review *
