This was such an interesting book. When Cat impulsively bought herself a snake at the very beginning, I questioned where the story was going (but in a good way!). I enjoyed the dark satire and relaxed tone that was present on each page. Even though the characters didn't always make the best decisions, I enjoyed finding out what events their actions would trigger. I also appreciated the environmental aspect; I hadn't ever considered turning to bugs as a sustainable food alternative, but this book certainly put that into my head.

*3.5 stars rounded up.

Let's pretend life is all blue skies and sunshine, shall we? Hah! Not when the realities of climate change make themselves felt.

This is the story of one family's experiences of life in the near future. The mother, Ottilie, lives with her husband Frank in Santa Barbara, California. Her son Cooper is an entomologist who works in the next valley. He has been preaching about climate change for many years and has gotten his mother to start farming insects and substituting them for meat in their meals. Her daughter Catherine lives with her boyfriend in a Florida beach house he inherited. Cat's plan is to become an Instagram influencer with her pet python Willie II.

The family quickly learns that their lives and plans are at the mercy of Mother Nature, be it a wedding, a funeral, or even going about a job. Drought and fires plague California while hurricanes and tropical storms inundate the Florida coast.

Although these characters were well-developed, I did not like them at all. Did I learn anything from their situations and problems? Ummm, no. Is that where Boyle's black humor comes in? I was glad the book ended on a seemingly upbeat note. One can hope, at any rate. But I don't think I'll be eating grasshoppers or crickets any time soon.

I received an arc of this new novel from the author and publisher via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

“Blue Skies” by T.C. Boyle is an outstanding climate-change novel. The characters are well-developed, and this could have been just a good family drama, but the raw edge of nature’s backlash at mankind’s unmindful, disastrous attitudes and actions cuts a different path. The story centers on the family of Frank and Ottilie and their two grown children - Cooper (“bugboy”) the environmental-doomsday entomologist and his sister, Cat the climate-change-oblivious, striving influencer. Frank, Ottilie, and Cooper live in California where the increasing and merciless baked-in droughts, rainless skies, scorching heat, angry wildfires, and energy blackouts are becoming the norm. Cooper suffers a tick bite with life-altering consequences. Optimistic, determined, and idealistic Ottilie is doing her part to mitigate climate change by cultivating bug farms and cooking meatless, sustainable protein meals. This is not a dysfunctional family, far from it. But nature does not care.

Cat lives in coastal Florida with her fiancée, Todd, soon to be her husband. Life there is one of endless downpours, floods and mold, drenching heat, beachfront property destruction, invasive wildlife – all seeping into daily life. Cat’s remedy for this altered world is to impulsively buy a Burmese python as a fashion accessory. She actually has bought two pythons, but an ominous glimpse of nature’s brutality reduces the number to one. Cat and Todd’s memorable outdoor wedding in California’s scorching heat evolves into a nightmare of raging winds driving guests indoors and tents taking flight – followed by a power cut and an ash-choking approaching fire, thus abruptly ending the romantic celebration. Soon Cat and Todd have twins, and the stark, cringeworthy fact of a python in the house with baby twins sticks in the reader’s mind. What were Cat and Tod thinking?

What follows is a perfectly created series of events where each may seem to be “the big event” we expect, such as Ottilie’s excruciating trip to be with Cat in Florida for the delivery. Nothing is easy, and then comes the Bug Apocalypse worldwide. Each event ticks up the expectation of calamity from climate change’s onslaught. But the writer’s discipline stacks these events as hurdles and moves on, while the characters strive to adapt and face obstacles, ironically without really planning for the near future’s even probable harsher reality. All the while, they seem to cope with the help of a lot of alcohol, supporting each other in their own way, and more alcohol.

While reading “Blue Skies,” it was hard not to silently (or not) sing the song and savor the writer’s talent at this irony. He also knows how to focus while ramping up the stress level for the characters and the reader, without crashing. He is a superbly creative and disciplined writer. This was T.C. Boyle giving us an engrossing climate change novel that feels plausible, and it stands out.

While I have read many of his short story collections, this was my first novel by him. It will not be the last. I am grateful to Liveright Publishing (W.W. Norton & Company), NetGalley, and T.C. Boyle for the early access to this exceptional book. This opinion is all my own.

Intriguing novel that blends a climate change doomsday in Florida and California with complex and devastating family relationships. The characters are complex, interesting, and unlikeable.

I was drawn in by the promise of dystopian humor. Such an odd combination should have been a warning. Blue Skies was well crafted and believable. Not just in predicting the world climate change could create, but regarding the nature of humanity, where life could become bleaker and more awful, but people would continue on with their lives. I suppose the absurd levels of escalating tragedy could be considered dark humor, but I was left with depression and disillusionment.

Thank you to Netgalley and WW Norton for the ARC!

A dystopian novel about the inevitable and catastrophic result of climate change should not be funny or enjoyable. But this one really is.

Set either slightly in the future (a few years at most) or in a slightly exaggerated version of the present, Blue Skies tells the story of California residents Ottilie and Frank, and their wildly different children. Cooper is an entomologist who stayed in California. He warns people about climate change constantly, as well as encouraging actions of personal responsibility, like bug cultivation for protein at meals. He's focused on species preservation, and is a bit disdainful of his mother's middle class preoccupations with nice things (for instance, he scoffs at the idea of a wedding reception because it would over use the toilet tank, and encourage wasteful overconsumption of food).

Meanwhile, daughter Cat lives in Florida with her Bacardi rep fiancé, bored and boozing, trying to make it as an influencer. Their beachfront home is constantly under threat from the epically high tides and near-constant flooding thanks to the near-constant rain. Despite the very in your face sign that climate change is a happening, has happened, and will have dire consequences for them and their home, the two are content to focus on appearance and reputation.

This novel is either an intimate story of family dynamics or a satire of an entire nation/globe. Or both. It could be a cautionary tale, or it could be a "too late, now reap this future." Whatever the intention, it's witty and propulsive and the characters and complex and fully-realized and annoying and loveable. Read it.

In flood-ravaged Florida and fire-plagued California, in the not too distant future, our scariest climate change nightmares come true, virtually wiping out the biggest class of Earth's animal kingdom. Ottilie and Frank Cullen, and their adult children Catherine and Cooper are the subjects in this cautionary tale writ large, demonstrating what happens when warnings are ignored wholesale by a family, and by civilization. Ottilie may have warned her children away from alcohol due to a propensity to addiction on both sides of the family, but that doesn't stop any of the four of them from over-indulging, to an entertaining, then concerning and ultimately terrifying degree. JG Ballard may have coined the term cli-fi in the early 2010s, but TC Boyle introduces it to me here in Blue Skies, furthering confusion between two of my favorite short-form authors. I love TC Boyle for his unfailing ability to nail so many of America's regional cultures and subcultures, attitudes and foibles in such a darkly hilarious fashion.

A satire and eco thriller that all starts when a woman decides to buy a snake on a whim. The writing here wasn’t my favorite but others might enjoy it more!

What a rollicking adventure..buoyant, entertaining and yet provocative. Boyle always manages to deliver and in the process we are always being educated. In this novel, climate change is explored with full force while we watch as a family tries to cope with all the ecological disasters. Mom and Dad live in Santa Barbara and while giving homage to their entomologist son, Cooper, begin making meals with grasshoppers and crickets. Cooper holds an absolutist’s faith that the climate crisis will not end unless mankind changes his/her ways. The daughter, Cat, lives in Beach Haven,Florida where she buys a Burmese python as a pet and hopes it will increase her visibility as an influencer on social media. However, wherever one turns, catastrophe pummels their world. The wedding of Cat and her boyfriend are beset by winds and fires, Cooper has a confrontation with a tick with major consequences; rising tides beset the outside of Cat’s beach house and this constant water affects the house structure as well. You remember the news about the California heat? Boyle has managed to include that with wildfires that change dynamics in living situations and with friends. The list goes on and on. This terrific book flows evenly and quickly, but also is a stark reminder of what is happening and could proliferate in the future. Love, love loved the world Boyle created. I am sure you will too.
Warning: there are some graphic disasters that might be too intense for some people..

Boyle’s contribution to climate fiction is a study in subtlety. Global events are ignored for what happens in two coastal states, Florida and California, homes to siblings and their significant others, the parents of said brother and sister live in California. The son, a grad student of insect studies as are the women he dates–his early inclination toward insects while still a tween earned him the nickname, Bug Boy–sets up a beehive for Mom. Mom goes the extra step in following advice from her son to save the planet by switching from animal protein to insect protein, the main culinary staple shared with her husband is a cricket-based diet.

As days grow hotter and hotter in sunny California, the weather in Florida gets wetter, not good for the daughter and her partner, living in a beach house on stilts in a waterfront community where several of the houses have been red tagged, cited for water damage. Hurricanes strike with an unusual frequency.

Boyle touches on several themes in this novel, pairing is one of them. Marriage, twins, siblings, two alligators and several objects. And the thing with the bees, another theme, one handled by Douglas Coupland in his novel Generation A.

There’s scarcely no time to breathe as the characters in Boyle’s novel move from crisis to crisis in this quasi-horror novel. Imagine a kind of literary Jurassic Park where some kid takes a baby dinosaur as a pet and the saurian parents destroy everything and anyone in sight in search for their offspring or the angry aviary pestilence in Hitchcock’s Birds, only with subtlety, that kind of vengeance from a fed-up planet facing the state of exhaustion and extinction.

Boyle’s is a cautionary tale, a warning to humans what will happen if we don’t check our runaway consumerism, which is the business of climate fiction to wake us up. Boyle’s take isn’t humorous or satirical nor is his message so heavy as to weigh down the story. This is a good story and, as always, Boyle’s writing, like fiction by John Irving, is a pleasure to read.

What a cast of characters! Equal parts family drama and informed climate change horror. This was my first T.C. Boyle novel and I think this was a great foray into his humor, snark, and wit as well as playfulness with story telling. But this is not *just* a story. Blue Skies was an almost disparaging but all too real(ish) tale that did a great job to make me fear for and hate humanity all at once. Which is right in line with how I feel anyway!

Thank you to W.W. Norton and NetGalley for a copy of this novel in exchange for an unbiased review.
I found this novel entirely riveting. As a Floridian, Cat's story was truly terrifying as the effects of living in a coastal town during a climate crisis slowly creep into her deteriorating personal life. One of the things that works best in this novel is that everyone is at least a little bit insufferable, but you can't help but feel for them when bad things happen - some of which are the effect of their own choices, and some are entirely out of their hand(s). I absolutely loved this one from start to finish.

not compelling enough, was giving this author one more try and just dont find him interesting. the topic is important and i appreciate the effort. the stream of consciousness dosent help the story flow for me.

Blue Skies begins as a fun story of a family doing some quirky things to get through the challenge of Climate Change. I chuckled a bit at first, and thought this story would be similar to some of Carl Hiaasen's books - so enjoyable! But then, the unthinkable horror happens, and I really had a hard time getting through the rest of the book. This was not fun, as it turns out, and I would call it depressing. If that's what T.C. Boyle intended with Blue Skies and his anticipation of the consequences of Climate Change, then he accomplished his goal.

The three stars are for Boyle's writing style, which was outstanding. It's just the story itself that put me in a "downer" state of mind.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read and review Blue Skies.

T.C. Boyle has written about climate change before, but in, shall we say, a more restrained way. in Blue Skies he uses a cleaver instead of a scalpel, a bludgeon instead of a switch. Set in the two coastal climate hell-holes of Florida and California (what's keeping you there, Tom?) --the former drowning in Biblical deluges, the latter drought-stricken and frying under relentless sun -- Boyle chronicles the travails of an extended family as they try to deal with Motherfrigging Nature. Black humor is always a signature dish on a Boyle menu, but Blue Skies goes Michelin four-star in bringing the Dark. A Florida gal who drinks too much fancies a Burmese python as a pet, then has twin girls. A California lad who studies bugs gets a tick bite on his arm that he fails to notice until.... Heatstroke,, water shortages, floods, bee die-offs -- all features of the New World Odor. A cautionary tale brought to you by a master of disaster with mordant wit.

This is my first TC Boyle. It took me longer than I expected to get through, not that it was bad but it was slow. I love family dramas and this was one. I just list my pro’s and con’s.

Pro’s:
Family drama
Messy family drama🤭
Florida setting
California setting
Reference to a changing climate
Dark humor
Good writing

Cons:
Slow pace
A little longer than need be

So the pro out weighs the con. If you’re looking for a slow paced darkly humorous family drama then this will fill the bill.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest opinion.
3.5⭐️

"Blue Skies" is exactly the cli-fi novel that you hoped T.C. Boyle would write. It's acutely observed, funny, a little snarky, and a story you'll want to ride from start to finish.

Set in the near future, it follows Ottilie and her family. She and husband Frank live in the formerly cool and moist Central Coast of California, which is now a a blast furnace of heat and fire. Son Cooper is a an entomologist;, seeing the doom of species up close, and daughter Cat is in Florida, living in a beach house inherited by her Bacardi brand-rep fiancee as she's striving to become an influencer. Taking refuge in a pet store during one of Florida's torrential rains, she sees a beautiful snake and buys it to enhance her online presence. This snake will set off a chain of events that will cost them all.

Boyle has chosen two geographic areas where he can show the most dramatic impacts of climate change. There are a few mentions of tornadoes or storms in other parts of the country, but as near opposites California and Florida take center stage. Florida has big storms several times a week, and the insects have grown to hamster-size and are increasingly bold. Scorching, dry winds scrape California and fires overwhelm homes in minutes. Ottilie takes her son's advice and begins cultivating insects as protein, to mixed results. But there's plenty of alcohol and everybody's drinking.

After another winter of crazy weather across the US, setting this novel in the near future plays well. Eco-activists Ottilie and Cooper are doing their best to mitigate disaster while the oblivious Cat and brings a highly invasive snake species into her home, one that has killed off a great percentage of Florida native wildlife. Who is more or less effective?

Excellent characterizations and an intelligent premise make this book a winner.

Warning: Do not read if you have a queasy stomach, especially involving threats to children. Also, people eat insects. Do not read if you require loveable characters. Do not read if you are already suffer from anxiety over climate change.

For the rest of us, dive on in!

I cut my teeth on black humor my sophomore year in college with a Modern Lit class focusing on Black Humor. I loved it. Yet, while reading Blue Skies, I hesitated to turn pages when I knew what was surely coming.

Blue Skies is set in the all too near future, when rising oceans lap up to the steps of oceanfront properties, and temps soar over 100 in Southern California. Nature is biting back. Some people are like the proverbial frogs in the kettle over the fire, oblivious to the threat, while others try to do the right thing, albeit decades too late. Oh, yes, this part is all too spot on.

Influencer wannabe Cat buys a Burmese python which she plans to wear as a fashion statement. During high tides, she rows a skiff from the house to dry land. Her husband is often on the road for work, and she kills time at the local bar. She has a hard time coping when she gives birth to twins.

Her brother Cooper still lives in Southern California where he studies declining insect populations, while his girlfriend studies ticks; they are often both out in the field taking samples. This leads to a close encounter between a tick and Cooper’s arm and dire complications and a break up. Cooper’s new girlfriend studies kissing bugs. They carry the parasite that causes Chagas, which is now showing up in the blood supply: “the parasites didn’t even need the kissing bug to infect their hosts anymore–the Red Cross was doing it for them.”

Their mother is switching from meat to insects. Her fried grasshoppers and mescal worm tacos were a hit at the dinner party, although people thought they were eating shrimp. Only one person was ill the next day. Fire is a continual threat, water shortages and energy blackouts a part of daily life.

Lots of bad stuff happens, because people are stupid and people are oblivious and nature is predictable. But when things seem most hopeless, Cooper discovers that nature has a few surprises left.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through Net Galley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I loved the sharp, polished prose in Blue Skies, and appreciated the well-drawn characters, and vivid descriptions with apt, original imagery. It's a testament to the excellence of Boyle's writing that his characters can be as often unlikable as they are yet keep the reader turning the pages even when s/he may be disgusted by terrible decisions or behavior. What puzzles me somewhat in the novel is the messaging--is our fate now determined by climate change and out of our hands, or would better decisions and diligent work avert the disasters toward which we inexorably head? Or is it possibly that humans are just so innately stupid that there really wasn't a chance that we weren't going to destroy the earth? This is a great book for discussion, at any rate, and recommended for book clubs that like to grapple with science and ideas--perhaps ones that aren't serving a meal during their discussions, though. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC.

"Blue Skies" by T.C. Boyle is a slightly difficult book for me to review. On the one hand, the writing is very good; on the other, I found nearly all of the characters insufferable who consistently made poor decisions. The underlying theme of climate change/doom was not the most depressing aspect to this novel. The shock/despair I felt reading this was instead, mostly due to the stunningly bad actions/decisions from many of the main characters, especially Cat.

Without giving spoilers, there are some very dark and disturbing scenes throughout the story. Somehow, I didn't see them coming. Some readers might be turned off by certain scenes involving violence.

I did find this novel very readable, and I think climate fiction is extremely relevant to today's reader. I also really liked the cover art.

I'd recommend this novel to readers who enjoy climate fiction, contemporary family dramas, and those who are interested in the natural world and its inhabitants.

I'm rating this 4 stars, mostly for the writing, but the story itself was probably more of a 3.5 for me. I felt there were times when the author just went on and on describing minute/uninteresting daily events, and then other times when I wanted to know more information and the topics were left unresolved or there were time jumps and certain topics were just never mentioned again.

Thank you to Netgalley and W.W. Norton & Company for providing an advanced copy for review in exchange for my honest feedback. I will put my review on Goodreads closer to publication date.