The effects of climate change on a micro scale. How one family is affected by the alteration of the environment. The fact that one member is a scientist studying insects brings an added level of depth as does the Florida and California locations.

This book is sharp! But this is not for the faint of heart. Some of the events are traumatic, to say the least.
The world is heating up. Climate change is a known factor and this family is experiencing rising tides and destructive rains.

Cat is living a mundane life. She fights for her boyfriend's attention and his commitment. She is still seeking a purpose in life. Her mother is seeking purpose as well after a long tenure as her husbands office manager. Her brother is seeking an etymology degree and her husband is retired.

As this family seeks purpose and a place in this hectic and chaotic world, the choices made are questionable at best. They seem somewhat undaunted by the effects, I for one, will always remember them!

If you like climate change dystopia, uncomfortable family dynamics, and dark comedic prose, Blue Skies is for you!
#wwnortoncompany #wwn #TCboyle #Blueakies

I admire and applaud the genius of T.C. Boyle's writing chops. Currently, I cannot, for personal reasons, appreciate a novel about devotion to changing the planet's future through fieldwork or cooking with insects. My mind is too caught up in wondering how we will survive the violence in our society and the rampant misogyny worldwide.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book.

Of Blue Skies I am two minds, as perhaps was T.C. Boyle when he set down to write this book. A simple family tale or a polemic on climate change? Are the characters agents of their own actions, or has climate change replaced fate as the controller of lives? Are we doomed by our past actions, or do we simply make do?
It’s a plodding plot, not so much a plot as a situation—situation dystopia. The world is seen alternately through the eyes of earnest mother Ottile (the wife of a doctor, comfortably middle-class) and her grown children, the somewhat superficial daughter Cat, and son Cooper, an entomologist and the Cassandra figure of the tale. Cat lives with fiancé Todd in Florida, while he other two are in California. One coast in perpetual drought and the other perpetually water-logged. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames on one coast while whole neighborhoods are reclaimed by the sea on the others.
The setting is not some future dystopia, but the dystopia of today and perhaps the next eight or so years in the future. The story captures the mundanity of experience at the end of the world. Sundowners and king tides (two weather phenomena I’m not familiar with, but apparently soon will be) intrude on the rituals which mark our lives, marriages and births and deaths. There are moments of joy and tragedy, as in any lives, and whether those tragedies are caused by a collapsing planet or human inertia and hubris is rather fuzzy.
This was by no means a slog to read. The story is underpinned by diamond-hard prose which is a pleasure to read. Characters are fully realized and complex. Perhaps it’s the author’s ambivalence, whether our world is truly at an end, or whether we can survive on cricket cookbooks and drones for pollinating our crops, that leaves me scratching my head. We’ll all muddle through somehow.

T.C. Boyle - famed short story writer, teacher and student of the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop and prolific novelist - shows no signs of slowing down on this, his eighteenth novel. Blue Skies follows Cat, a down on her luck suburbanite whose quest to buy a snake leads to tragic consequences. The novel is a masterful blend of humour and pathos, that makes me want to dig further into the T.C Boyle catalogue.

For being another novel about the impending doom facing us because of our carelessness that has wreaked climate damage on our planet, this is one of the most witty novels I've read. For once, a novel that addresses climate change without being a dour, dystopian read. This novel deals with a family of four, three living on the coast in California, one on the Florida coast, and neither coast fare wells with the high winds, heat, and fires in California, and the nonstop rain in Florida, but somehow, this family remains connected and concerned. The father is a physician, and his wife ran the office of his family practice, but once she retires, her entomologist son's overbearing lectures about saving the planet have made an impact on her as she grows her food, raises bees, eats bugs not meat. Throughout the novel, the daughter's young husband is never likable. He inherited his mother's beach house in Florida so the young couple move there, where he obsesses over his Tesla, and their daughter, Cat, obsesses over her new snakes and becoming an influencer on social media with her outfits matching the Burmese snakes wrapped around her neck.

Not wanting to give away spoilers, things do happen to this family, and to some degree, they seem oblivious to much of what other humans would find as horrific events, experiences to grieve, but these folks keep the cocktails and take-out orders floating throughout their days as the water rises, homes burn, and the world suffers. Boyle's narrative is not only witty, but his prose pulses like the coastal winds making this doomsday scenario an engaging read.