This is staggeringly good. It is pretty genius climate fiction, drawing a clear narrative and thematic parallel between nature and Franny herself. She believes herself a damaged creature as she feels the edges of cage in every place she’s ever been. While we struggle to understand her via the consequences of her actions before cause, the structure of the novel jumps around in time and place, coming together masterfully.

It’s actually difficult to talk about why I liked this because I liked everything about it! The prose are something akin to A River Runs Through It, the structure is utilized to great effect. The theme and character are so intertwined yet so effective and simple it made think that this is the cli-fi we need to wake up people to environmental problems we face. This idea that people are somehow divorced and above nature while we continue to be impacted in positive and negative ways by it daily is brought into such sharp focus with Franny.

It’s nuanced yet it effectively communicates complex ideas so well. There’s a balance too, which is hard to find in cli-fi sometimes. Either too hopefully or too dire. Plus, it tries to disabuse people of the notion that nature could somehow be entirely eradicated, when we don’t actually understand vast amounts of ecologies, or even ourselves. We hardly know how to nurture anything, let alone the outliers. But that doesn’t mean their fate is defined. As happens not infrequently with nature, edge cases and the non-typical may find a way to thrive in ways we can’t even imagine for ourselves.