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A Novel
by T.C. Boyle
Book Reviewed by:From best-selling novelist T. C. Boyle, a satirical yet ultimately moving send-up of contemporary American life in the glare of climate change.
Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like "jewelry, living jewelry" to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young "Burmie" she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.
"Brilliantly imaginative ... in a terrifying way" (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle's finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the "new normal," in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there's more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet's future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which "the only truism seems to be that things always get worse."
An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle's Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and "inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything."
Despite the intensity of the events that take place, this is a book for readers more interested in exploring character than plot. Blue Skies is a family drama set against a backdrop of worldwide calamity. It is horrifying at times, at others darkly comedic. There were moments when I wanted to shout at the characters, and others I wished I could give them a hug. This is not a book for those looking for escapism—the characters, their problems and their failings often feel uncomfortably real. The ways in which they handle, or refuse to handle, the challenges they face serve as a warning just as potent on the personal level as the depiction of climate change is on the global...continued
Full Review
(523 words)
(Reviewed by Katharine Blatchford).
In T.C. Boyle's Blue Skies, environmentally conscious Ottilie tries her hand at raising her own livestock—not chickens or pigs, but crickets. In Western society today, people often react with horror at the idea of eating insects, but there are advantages to including them in your diet. Many insects are an excellent source of important nutrients, including protein, fats and various vitamins. They are a more sustainable source of these nutrients than more commonly consumed animal products such as beef, pork and chicken, because they require less land and produce fewer pollutants for the same amount of food.
Our aversion to eating insects is cultural, not innate; roughly two billion people around the world regularly eat insects. ...
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Annie Proulx
Is climate change funny? Yes, in the brilliantly imaginative T. C. Boyle's hands, in a terrifying way. Blue Skies is both comic and wrenching... . A black arrow of unimaginable horror shoots through the novel's center, and Boyle leads us to contemplate the 'inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything'―and a morsel of the world's inexpressible beauty.
