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A review by sophiereads21
Clade by James Bradley
4.0
This book follows a family down roughly 4 generations, Adam and Ellie as they have their first child, Summer a teenager at house parties, Noah obsessed with the stars. The story skips forwards a decade at a time - meaning the family relationships are fraught with hidden tension that the reader has not witnessed. Set against a changing climate, the characters face flood, pandemic, fire and species extinction but not always in a direct or in your face way.
Reading this book in 2023 post covid was slightly terrifying in that whole "we clearly have known that pandemics are going to be a potential side effects of a human changed climate" and yet it still took the world by surprise! Which honestly just encapsulates the whole book, we know what the effects of climate change will be (they are already happening) and yet every time we are surprised by the number of deaths, or that yet another species has gone extinct.
One of the things this book does excellently is the small ways climate change impacts on every day life and the way it fades into 'background noise', rolling brown outs meaning you have to replace all the food in your fridge periodically, snippets of the news from other parts of the world, the loss of coffee as a crop.
This book talks about survival through change (flood, fire, pandemic) and reads as very depressing the whole way through (not recommended if you already have climate anxiety) but ends on a weirdly forced feeling of hope (people are still here and will persist) that isn't present in any of the other parts of the book.
I think this book may in an accessible way tell people what science cannot, it is already too late. We have already changed the Earth's climate irrevocably, all that is left to to change out behaviour as much as we can (mostly looking at you large corporations) and ride out the impacts.
Reading this book in 2023 post covid was slightly terrifying in that whole "we clearly have known that pandemics are going to be a potential side effects of a human changed climate" and yet it still took the world by surprise! Which honestly just encapsulates the whole book, we know what the effects of climate change will be (they are already happening) and yet every time we are surprised by the number of deaths, or that yet another species has gone extinct.
One of the things this book does excellently is the small ways climate change impacts on every day life and the way it fades into 'background noise', rolling brown outs meaning you have to replace all the food in your fridge periodically, snippets of the news from other parts of the world, the loss of coffee as a crop.
This book talks about survival through change (flood, fire, pandemic) and reads as very depressing the whole way through (not recommended if you already have climate anxiety) but ends on a weirdly forced feeling of hope (people are still here and will persist) that isn't present in any of the other parts of the book.
I think this book may in an accessible way tell people what science cannot, it is already too late. We have already changed the Earth's climate irrevocably, all that is left to to change out behaviour as much as we can (mostly looking at you large corporations) and ride out the impacts.