I don’t typically read two climate fiction titles back to back–I need a break, usually–and you all know I don’t prioritize reading male authors. But I encountered a gorgeous, wrenching short story by Boyle last spring (“Chicxulub”) and was interested in how he would make narrative sense of the climate crisis. Like the short story, this novel focuses on the details of the lives of one particular family; the chapters are alternately narrated by a lonely, self-absorbed young woman, her entomologist brother, and their well-meaning but deeply bourgeois mother. Their story begins sometime around now or in a not-too-distant future, and encompasses a decade or more of marriages, births, deaths, loss of limbs, terrifying wildfires, and demolishing floods. Like the short story I loved, there’s a great deal of beauty in the novel’s closely observed human behavior as well as its gorgeous, occasionally astonishing prose. I think I may need to reread this book just for its vocabulary of natural disasters, which never once borrows a well-worn turn of phrase–the wind never howls, the fires never rage–instead finding utterly distinct and terrifying new language for increasingly frequent and deadly events. I also appreciate that the crises that befall this family are about half due to the climate, half due to their own human mistakes, although one is frequently tied to the other. Much to admire… and yet, this book is hard to love, with its short-sighted and frequently selfish narrators. The character Catherine in particular feels conceived to punish a certain type of young woman, which left a tinny taste in my mind.