BLUE SKIES

A tragicomic novel of environmental apocalypse in which no matter how bad things get, there’s worse to come.

Cat is a recent transplant from California to southern Florida, exchanging the threats of drought and wildfire for hurricanes and flooding. Well past adolescence but too young for middle age, she’s attempting to get her life on track, hoping to become a viral influencer. A creature of impulse (this novel sees the creature inside every human), she wanders into a store selling snakes and finds herself smitten by a baby Burmese python. She knows it will eventually grow bigger, but right now it is the perfect fashion accessory to drape around her arm and neck. And Cat really isn’t the type to think things through. Boyle knows what should happen when you put a woman and a snake in a place once considered Eden, and, soon enough, all hell breaks loose. Or maybe not quite soon enough, for there is some plodding and padding before the plot really takes off. Though, when it does, the breathless momentum matches the tonal command, which walks a tightrope between darkest humor and truly horrifying. Beyond snakes, droughts, floods, and fires, there are ticks, termites, heatstrokes, amputations, and a huge social media backlash as Cat learns that celebrity has its downside. She has become “Python Mom” (and her brother is “Bug Boy”). To reveal too much plot would spoil the suspense, but the rituals once celebrated and the routines taken for granted—dating and mating, weddings, dinner parties, going to work or for a drive, a swim, or a drink—are all potentially fraught with terror. Yet so much of this is so funny, in a twisted sort of way. At one point, a character describes the novel he’s reading as cli-fi, and this novel might fit that category as well. Yet it doesn’t so much imagine a climate future as awaken us to today’s.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.