BookBrowse Reviews Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet

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A scrappy student and a famous billionaire form a surprising bond against an apocalyptic backdrop.

This book begins with a bombastic premise. Seemingly fed up with the heating planet, the world's animals have launched a revolution against humans. Rats swarm city streets while once gentle cats and dogs go wild and attack their owners. As humanity is forced indoors for safety, billionaire Roderick Maeve steps in with a solution. He funds the creation of a machine that uses a special sound wave to instantly kill every non-human creature on Earth. While some people are relieved that the animals are gone, others are devastated. Roderick, convinced of his role as savior, announces that all hope is not lost. He's commissioned a genius physicist to build a time machine that will not just bring back the animals, but solve climate change by introducing solar panels during the Industrial Revolution.

Despite its concept-heavy premise, this is a surprisingly character-driven story. Against its high-stakes backdrop, the plot zooms in on the reactions of Jenlena, a university student in Montreal, and her friends. Scrappy and morally gray, Jenlena capitalizes on the animals' extinction, digging up plants from parks and selling them at a high price point to former pet owners desperate for something to take care of. She also rents out her services as a surrogate pet, complete with Dalmatian costume. Jenlena isn't setting out to change the world, but to survive within it.

Her overachieving roommate Daphne, meanwhile, grows increasingly depressed and isolated, struggling to adapt to a world that feels so far out of her control. She writes down the names of every animal she's personally known, and recites them aloud tearfully. Her relationship with her boyfriend becomes more and more codependent, and she spends more and more time just lying on the couch.

When a chance encounter outside a Montreal hotel leads to a casual sexual relationship between Jenlena and Roderick, we see each character from the other's perspective. Roderick, who's been linked to a string of supermodels, loves that Jenlena is, from his point of view, a normal girl. To him, the average-looking younger woman who lives in a basement apartment seems simple and unpretentious. Jenlena is not overly attracted to middle-aged Roderick, and is at first somewhat cynical about their relationship. She has no illusions of love, but is entranced by his world of unimaginable luxury. When they have sex, she takes more pleasure in being an object of desire than she does in the actual act. An aspiring poet with a keen observational eye, Jenlena often looks at her life with an outsider's gaze.

Readers are sure to draw parallels between Roderick's world-changing actions and the hubris of some members of the Silicon Valley set. As we watch real-life billionaires jetting off into space and promising to "disrupt" entire industries, Roderick's efforts to unilaterally solve Earth's problems feel on brand. The limits of wealth is also a theme. Though Roderick is astoundingly rich, he doesn't fit in with the old-money crowd he longs to join. With every new milestone his net worth reaches, he thinks he will find belonging, but as the son of a teen mom from Florida, he never quite gains acceptance. He believes ending the animals' rampage will win him the acclaim he seeks, only to be iced out at the behest of a prominent heiress who deeply loved her pets. An object of envy for some and scorn for others, Roderick is at once astoundingly confident and painfully insecure.

By the time news breaks that the time machine is ready, Jenlena is starting to imagine an ongoing role for Roderick in her life. Yet she's unsure of what the altered timeline will hold. Meanwhile, Daphne is snapped out of her depression. The idea of the coming "new world" inspires her to do things she could have been doing all along but never did, like applying to graduate schools. Through imagined quotes from news stories sprinkled within the books' later chapters, we learn that a lot of people are imagining a better version of themselves post-time machine. It's like an apocalyptic version of the "I'll start fresh on Monday" mentality familiar to anyone trying to form a new habit.

The tone of the book is surreal and often satirical, with wry observations that hit unexpectedly hard. The various reactions we see to the extinction of the animals, ranging from protests to apathy to profit-mongering, reflect a mirror back on how people in real life cope with the growing threat of climate change. As in this story, billionaires might step in to try to save the day. Mood Swings questions whether we should let them.

This review first ran in the June 19, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.