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Book Reviewed by:
Norah Piehl
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From the author of the nationwide bestseller Dept. of Speculation--one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year--a shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis.
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks...And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
The publisher is unable to provide an excerpt to BookBrowse, but you will find one at The Cut (link opens in a new window)
"How do you maintain your optimism?" That question is at the heart of Jenny Offill's Weather. Although the novel raises far more questions than it answers (and that's part of the point, after all), Lizzie's experience seems to suggest that the answer to this main question lies in understanding and forgiveness—for our families, for our neighbors, for utter strangers and, not least of all, for ourselves...continued
Full Review
(616 words).
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Ocean Vuong
This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy. Ben Lerner
Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It's this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present. Jia Tolentino
No one writes about the intersection of love and existential despair like Jenny Offill. Sheila Heti
Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes.
Part of the plot of Jenny Offill's Weather involves the protagonist, Lizzie, answering questions posed by listeners to her former academic mentor's disaster-preparedness podcast, Hell and High Water. As issues surrounding climate change increasingly propel public conversation, real-world counterparts to this fictional podcast abound. Here is a roundup of some of the best podcasts for understanding the climate emergency.
Climate One
This weekly podcast grew out of an influential forum that brings together leaders in the fields of energy, the economy and the environment. Timely topics include climate psychology and climate and human migration; the program also profiles notable scientists and authors working and writing in these fields.
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More books by Jenny Offill
If you liked Weather, try these:
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