Trigger warnings: Talk about the end of the world, climate change, discussion around addiction
Synopsis: Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience--but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks . . . And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
Review: Weather is, honestly, a pretty difficult book to review, but I’ll do my best. The general premise is that we follow a woman named Lizzie at different parts of her life. We sometimes get to see her as she’s working at a university library. At other times, we see her dealing with her addict brother. We also get to see her interacting with her husband and son, with and without her brother around. I wanted to like Lizzie, mostly because I also worked at a university library. That aspect of her life, I related to very well. Still, that was the only part of Lizzie’s life that felt solid to me. The story is told is a segmented way, so it’s really hard to get to know Lizzie as a character. The only reason why I was able to relate to her as a librarian is because I also had that life experience.
At some point during the story, a friend wants her to answer mail for a podcast. This part of the story didn’t feel very fleshed out. We only get to see a handful of questions asked and answered. The synopsis makes it seem like Lizzie is supposed to be answering questions about the end of the world and attempting to quell any fears people might have. I never really saw that. I was honestly hoping that Weather would allow Lizzie to read a question for the podcast, and then we would see her research and wrestle with the question a bit before answering. That way we get a bit more insight into her life and her relationships, on top of any personal beliefs she has towards climate change and the end of the world.
Very underwhelming, but I would like to pick up other books by Jenny Offill to see if they’re more my style.
2 howls
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