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A review by momankara
Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle
3.0
Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook. The audiobook was well done. The narrator did a very good job with male voices and the tones and quirks of all the different characters.
The book was well-written, but it was not one of the best climate fiction books I've read. The ways that the natural world can break down in the not so distant future are there, and this bicoastal family is set to experience the worst of it. The issue is that the characters have almost no interior life. They simply do things, and much of what they do is drink and make other questionable decisions. The constant drinking and lack of introspection blunts the characters' personalities and makes them unsympathetically flat-footed in the face of imminent tragedies. I think this lack of interior life also allows the author to dump tragedy upon tragedy on the characters, since the reader has not bonded with them. I understand the author is trying to say that people are silly and are so divorced from the natural world as to be incapable of dealing with this, but I kept finding myself trying to find connections with the characters, only to be thwarted at every turn. The descriptions of the animals and the weather are more vivid than the descriptions of the people.
The book was well-written, but it was not one of the best climate fiction books I've read. The ways that the natural world can break down in the not so distant future are there, and this bicoastal family is set to experience the worst of it. The issue is that the characters have almost no interior life. They simply do things, and much of what they do is drink and make other questionable decisions. The constant drinking and lack of introspection blunts the characters' personalities and makes them unsympathetically flat-footed in the face of imminent tragedies. I think this lack of interior life also allows the author to dump tragedy upon tragedy on the characters, since the reader has not bonded with them. I understand the author is trying to say that people are silly and are so divorced from the natural world as to be incapable of dealing with this, but I kept finding myself trying to find connections with the characters, only to be thwarted at every turn. The descriptions of the animals and the weather are more vivid than the descriptions of the people.