Sea Monsters derives little energy from what happens to Luisa, or from how she changes during her travels. Instead, it works like a poem, gathering steam through image, repetition, and metaphor ... Like a magician, Aridjis is obsessed with elusiveness; like a symbolist, she far prefers imagination and metaphor to plain sight ... the novel’s satisfactions come not from character growth or plot resolution, but from the evoking of emotion through symbols ... Few novels operate this way, but many poems do. I found that Sea Monsters frequently conjured Elizabeth Bishop’s 'The Fish,' with its rapt attention to the fish’s real and imagined body. The victory at the poem’s end comes not from catching or keeping the fish, but from having beheld it. Observation and beauty create meaning ... 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.

...Sea Monsters is a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments ... Plot has very little role to play in Sea Monsters; Aridjis allows her narrative to swell and recede like the sea, along with Luisa’s capacious imagination. Episodes from the beach and the city are woven together, not so much to advance a narrative arc, as to build rich evocations of place and to sketch out the inner world of a fickle teenager who is both restless and apathetic, self-absorbed and self-aware ... The violent rains, the traffic, the perennial security threat—these scenes wonderfully evoke the city’s ability to make its inhabitants feel claustrophobic ... But the novel is just as powerful when depicting the capital’s opposite, the tiny Oaxacan beach town of Zipolite, which turns out to be no idyll either. Here Aridjis evokes the eerie, interminable crashing of waves on the shore; the eccentric mix of nudists, beachcombers, and European tourists ... Aridjis’s protagonist is so rich and interesting because she is full of contradiction. For all that she is image conscious and desirous of new experiences, her fragile sensibility is quietly revealed ... Sea Monsters is a contemplative, meandering novel—there are no unexpected plot twists, no great climactic resolution. But, Aridjis excels at writing a life lived in the borderlands between reality and fantasy, conveying the imagination of a 17-year-old with whims and fancies that are intriguing rather than exasperating or laughable.

The narrator has a strange, sharp brain, roiling with classical references, and her judgments give the book an intellectual rigor that is somehow not at odds with its dreamy lethargy ... Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald’s or Cusk’s, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions ... self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating.

... while the execution of this novel supplies a hybrid-gravity of folklore, history, poetry, and science, the absence of imminent danger or risk made it easy to feel distant from the story itself ... a fascinating engine, but a force that stopped at intrigue before it got to emotional investment ... the events of this story pale in comparative thrust to Luisa’s fabulist observations, yielding the portrait of a young woman whose primary conflict is that of being assailed by her own unrelenting fabulism ... The tonal-darkness of this novel is ever-present and completely absent at the same time ... the ever-wandering flow of the prose comprised largely of reveries makes the novel feel like a journal dripping with nostalgia ... Despite its title, there are no archetypal monsters; no villains; no lovable characters compelled by circumstance to commit immoral acts; no impossible odds to overcome; no serious betrayals portrayed or retributions gone too far. People and events of this nature are alluded to at points, but Aridjis avoids entertaining her readers with hatred for and/or fear of her primary characters. Without these relationships to the characters, this novel stays rooted in a state constantly before and after baser states of fear (and joy for that matter) ... Though I yearned for an emotional hook that never presented itself, I can’t deny the allure of portraying life, especially in transitional moments, as a chaotic lingering between reality, memories, structures, and dreams; Aridjis’s facility for depicting this mysterious braid of experience is as unstoppable as the hulking force of the ocean crashing and spreading itself thin and glassy across ancient layers of sand.

A dreamy, wandering tale of teenage ennui and searching, and the pull of the sea ... Aridjis's prose is well suited to this kind of story: her sentences are luminescent and imagistic, expressing Luisa's tendency to fancy...The plot of Sea Monsters is somewhat quiet, Luisa spending much of her time inside her own head, but Aridjis's style makes this an absolute pleasure even when nothing is happening.

You read [Aridjis] more for atmosphere than plot; her eccentrically detailed style holds out the promise of a big-picture coming together in a perpetual tease that, depending on how twitchy you’re feeling, leaves your expectations rewired or just frustrated ... 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 ... Aridjis, though, has never been an instrumentalist, kill-your-darlings kind of writer and by the end we’ve learned not to expect much from Adán or any of the zillion other cameos here. A last-minute change of perspective provides a payoff of sorts, but ultimately you enjoy Luisa’s company without ever being quite sure why she wants us around ... the narrative largesse turns out to be a type of withholding.

... captures the quiet slowness of adolescence ... in 2019, a piece of eternity is a generous idea. But these quiet moments also crackle, like an illicit wandering in an empty house, or a woman bathing at night in a city fountain...Aridjis treats these sensations with earnestness, again evoking the candor of young experience ... throws slightly exaggerated winks and nods to the historical avant garde through thematic material ... There are no words to describe the beauty and slowness of adolescence, or the fears we can’t name. This novel is a quiet and quick meditation on the paradox, capturing the vivid, terrifying, and fleeting.

The critically acclaimed Mexican American author writes stylishly but without drama. A description of Luisa’s mood comes dangerously close to describing the book itself, though it does succeed in painting a portrait of Mexico at the time. Fans of character-driven fiction will find enough to like here, in spite of the relatively immobile story.

Calls to mind one of those bizarre bioluminescent fish that live without light, deep below the ocean’s surface. It creeps along slowly, not doing much, but then blazes forth in a fleeting flash of brilliance ... Thermal inversion, ancient Greek astronomical devices, French poets (both Baudelaire and the lesser-known Lautréamont), angsty ’80s music (Depeche Mode and the Cure), the eponymous sea creatures — all are put forth with metaphorical significance, but ultimately none are developed beyond a few paragraphs. The focus turns from Luisa at the end, which is frustrating, because it is her story, even if not much happens.

You could describe Chloe Aridjis’s first two novels as mood pieces. Both have a Sebaldian preoccupation with the ways we are haunted by history ... At first, Sea Monsters appears to follow a similar path ... I cringed with recognition. How many adolescent girls have puffed up men with their enthusiasm into anything other than the wearisome drags they are? ... these specificities are dulled by the enduring cliché of Mexico as a repository of quirky illicitness. At moments, Aridjis satisfyingly parodies this stereotype ... Other times, perhaps despite herself, Aridjis writes the city as a holding pen for a cast of eccentrics ... Their arrival to the beach comes halfway through the novel. At this point, any remaining propulsion in the story is already languishing under the indifferent coastal sun ... Aridjis’s sentences are frothy enough to buoy Sea Monsters’s sluggishness, although at times their very airiness seems to evince the story’s vacuity of substance ... In her past work, Aridjis was able to ground her narrator’s scattered ruminations with the weight of history. In Sea Monsters, that sense of weight is absent.

What Aridjis makes of this surprising story is…rather boring. The book is half over before the heroine embarks on her quest, and nothing we learn in the first half of the story explains why Luisa would do something so capricious. At the same time, it’s hard to care. For a novel in which shipwrecks and the denizens of the ocean floor are recurring metaphors, this book seldom dives into the narrative. Instead of depth, we get a baroque style that doesn’t add much to our enjoyment or understanding ... References to 1980s punk and New Wave will be nostalgic landmarks for many readers, but we learn very little about Luisa beyond her taste in music ... There are eccentric characters and sensational incidents, but we never go below the surface ... A shallow coming-of-age fable.

Ethereal and ruminative ... Enmeshed in precocious Luisa’s inner world, readers follow surreal fantasies and fascinations ... The book functions more like a mood piece than a traditional novel, a fitting choice in rendering Luisa and Tomás’s life as runaways. 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.