I really enjoyed this one. Thank you, NetGalley for sharing this with me. I'll definitely be looking forward to reading more.

The west coast is on fire, the east coast, under water. Insects are disappearing. It is the end of the world as we know it, we may just have ruined things to the point of no return. Despite this,life must go on, people need to live their lives. Odille raised her two children, daughter Cat and son Cooper and now they are living their own lives. Things, however, are not going well for either, their lives very much in flux.

Realistic, but also humorous, something for which Boyle's books are noted. A mother trying to hold her family together despite physical distances. Weather that is extreme doesn't help in her endeavour,nor does the selfishness of her children. It is, after all, selfishness that has helped get us where we are, we seem to want what we want, when we want it, despite the dangerous and negative, results.

I have enjoyed most of this authors books. He inserts pertinent messages, causes, inside a humorous rendering.

The narration was superb.

This isn't usually the type of book I read, but I really enjoyed it! "Blue Skies" follows the stories of various members of a family as they cope with the daily effect of climate change. It's almost a dystopian comedy, and I definitely laughed out loud at times. Author T. C. Boyle has a writing style similar to Dorothy Parker, finding humor and interest in what could seem mundane. I loved the characters and wish I could follow their lives long after the last page.

This is a highly engaging satirical novel that tackles a very serious subject: the impact of climate change. I enjoyed the author's unique voice although I am not sure that this narrator was the best fit for the content

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Set in the not-too-distant future, T.C. Boyle’s novel, Blue Skies, follows an affluent California family of 4 as the planet continues on its course towards the effects of global warming. Three members of the family live in Santa Barbara; father Frank is a doctor, mother, Ottilie, responding to her son, Cooper’s beliefs about the destructive nature of the cattle industry exhausting precious resources, proudly buys a cricket farm to generate an alternate protein source. Cooper, an entomologist, is dating fellow entomologist Mari, who specialises in ticks. One day they collect ticks together which leads to an incident which has a tragic, life-altering outcome for Cooper.

Daughter, Cat, lives in Florida with her boyfriend, later husband, Bacardi ambassador, Todd. Cat and Todd moved to Florida when he inherited his now-deceased mother’s beach home, and with a sizeable chunk of his mother’s life insurance, he bought himself a Red Tesla Model X. Todd, one of those single-minded, unflappable men, whose life is a succession of compartments, travels a lot which means that Cat is left home alone frequently. Cat doesn’t get it yet, but she occupies a very small space in Todd’s life. He says he doesn’t want kids (“are you joking or what?”) or a dog or a cat (“he was allergic: hair, dander, fleas”) and one day while Cat waits for “perfectionist” Todd, who is busy supervising the detailing of his beloved Tesla, she looks at the window of Herps, a reptile shop, and spies a beautiful snake for sale. Cat, a would-be Instagram influencer, covets the snake ands sees it as “living jewelry.” Imagining the best colours she could wear to enhance the colour of the snake, she decides a snake is something she can hang around her neck as her signature trademark–a “statement.”

Talk about impulse buying–the minute she walked through the door and saw them glittering there in their plexiglass cases, she knew she had to have one.

The snake is a Burmese Python, and Cat, who doesn’t know the first thing about snakes let alone Burmese Pythons, happily takes him, “Willie,” home. Cat, left alone far too much, is already developing a drinking problem, and she stops at a bar on the way home and makes quasi-friends with the owner.

The novel follows the lives of Cat, Cooper and Ottilie (dad is very much in the background). In California, Ottilie and Cooper deal with soaring temps and food prices, water scarcity, and wildfires. Meanwhile on the other side of the country, Cat, is living in a beach house which is often inaccessible by car. The rain seems never ending, and then there are alligators and hurricanes.

The water was up to her shins by the time she turned into the peninsula road and she widened her stance, the way you do when you’re meeting resistance. But it was nothing really, and she’d seen higher tides before though this one seemed to be coming up still which was worrisome. Was there a limit? What if it rose ten feet? Twenty? What if it was like those CGI waves that stood on end in the disaster movies?

She passed the familiar houses which remained darkened except for the sentry lights, wondering whether anybody was at home even as the term ‘evacuation’ came into her head. A term she immediately dismissed because this wasn’t so bad. It was nothing, but then she was thinking how mild the hurricane season had been and what it would be like in a real blow and how they would manage to evacuate if it came to that. In a rowboat? They didn’t have a rowboat. She made a note to herself: they should get one, or no a speedboat which they could take out on the bay in muggy weather and at least generate a breeze and wouldn’t that be nice? Not to mention practical in case worst came to worst.

She was a long block away from the house when her eyes picked out something moving in the road, a log rolling on the tide, wasn’t it? She drew closer. It moved again. Not in the direction of the flow but against it. And what was that all about? The night was still. Not a breeze even. The only sounds, the trickle of the water and the incessant complaint of the insects. Curious, she pulled out her phone and shone the light on it so that all at once it fabricated itself out of spare parts and she saw what is was. An alligator. She was drunk, or at least drunk enough that everything seemed enchanting, the night, the water, Florida, but the sight of it gave her a start. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid, just that this thing, this reptile didn’t belong there, in the middle of her street at what … she snatched a look at the time … 12:30 in the morning. It was wrong. That was what it was. Like something out of a nature film on PBS transposed to her reality.

While people like Ottilie, are “doing their bit” using their guilt as currency in their everyday lives, there are people like Todd who sail on with tunnel vision. Blue Skies tackles a lot of serious issues: climate change, social media, parenting, the exotic animal trade (legal and illegal), and T.C. Boyle juggles them all perfectly. We see Cat and Cooper–Cat, consumed with social media to the point that her present is secondary to ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ is about to get a horrific awakening, while Cooper, increasingly depressed about his lack of achievement and the future of the planet, engages in some self-destructive behaviour. Even though Blue Skies is a serious novel, exploring some serious social issues, the characters are never secondary to the issues. Interestingly Boyle sets the stage for the characters to struggle against the elements, nature, and even themselves but there is always compassion and a little humour.

This was an amazing read, and I was sorry to get to the end of the book. Blue Skies easily makes my best of year list. I listened to the audio book version which was beautifully read by Alyssa Bresnaman

Review copy

Great story, well crafted, highly entertaining. And hopefully a message sent, regarding the havoc of climate change. As soon as I read Cat was pregnant, I knew what was going to happen to that baby.

An excellent book about a family in California and Florida dealing with life traumas and climate traumas. The narration was great.

What are book supposed to make us feel ? Entertained ? Then this is not the book for you unless a realistic look at a near apocalyptic climate crisis is entertaining for you ? This book was extremely realistic and set just a couple of years in the future- the horrific scenarios of heat and drought in California and rainy moldy humid heat in Florida aren’t taken from sci-fi fantasy. The depression the characters felt with both kinds of weather the extreme heat and the tropical rain were both extremely well written and completely believable - which is kind of the problem for me… this book was depressing to read… TC Boyle definitely is a master at his craft but evocative climate fiction doesn’t make for comfortable reading … especially since he does not provide an easy out or a laugh at characters that are just over the top. The Cullen family Frank and Ottilie and their grown children Cooper and Cat grow on you as you follow them through the years and hope sometime for better choices but mostly really for better outcomes. Boyle draws the Cullens with all their flaws but with tender affection, too, but Nature is biting back - the bugs, the snakes, the termites ... and it is not pretty.
Where Blue Skies begins as a fun story of a family doing some quirky things to get through the challenge of Climate Change - think mom’s cooking with insects and wants to breed her own and Cooper a Cassandra predicting doom -, but quickly this book takes a tune for much darker unthinkable horrors, realistic horrors, and I had a hard time getting through the rest of the book, it‘s me not the book, I need a hopeful vibe. Boyle does a brilliant job of writing about an enormous subject in utterly human terms.

It's been about a decade since I've read TC Boyle, so I was happy to find this audio book on NetGalley. It didn't disappoint. Boyle writes with an edge - pitch perfect dark satire in a voice that I could listen to forever. Additionally, I thought the narration by Alyssa Bresnahan was fantastic. Highly recommend!

One of the most stressful reads I have endured but could not put down.
I don’t want to spoil the plot on this one, so I’ll refrain from detail but let’s just say it touches on most if not all touchy subjects, addiction, marriage/relationship breakdown, impdending doom of global warming and child neglect.
Your moral compass is all over the place.
Todd is a dick, there are many lessons in this book.. but the main two I’d say are don’t be like Tod, and don’t mix babies and snakes.

I loved this book! I just finished it and immediately ordered a hard cover copy to give to someone who I know will also enjoy reading it. Thank you so much Netgalley for the audio ARC!

I’d already devoured two other books by TC Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain and Friend of the Earth, so I had an idea of what to expect from Blue Skies. TC Boyle’s characters are going to have problems, big problems, devastating problems, and at least one of them will probably die. They will also do some asshole things but some redemptive things as well. All in all, his characters are like me, like my family members, like people I’ve known all my life and love despite their flaws.

The family in Blue Skies drinks a lot. And who can blame them? Some of them live in California and contend with water restrictions so severe that they can only take one 3 minute shower a week. Heatstroke is a constant threat as brown outs cause temperatures inside the house to reach the 90s.

Catherine, the grown daughter of the family, leaves CA for coastal Florida, where there’s so much rain and flooding that she has to park a mile away from her house and walk through knee deep water every time the full moon causes tides to rise. Her fiancée travels frequently for work, and, lonely and bored, Cat mostly hangs out at the local bar.

I love the way this novel unfolds. TC Boyle takes his time setting up everyone’s situations, and it’s like a bunch of tiny explosives primed and ready to go off. About a third of the way through the book, the first shockingly bad thing happens, and then another, and then another. As readers, we know that when a character says “well, we’ve made it through the worst and things can only get better from here on out,” that means the absolute most catastrophic event is coming soon. And it does.

The suspense builds and builds, as one poor decision starts an unstoppable cascade of new problems. It’s all exceptionally well written and hard to put down!

I’m giving five stars to Blue Skies, the best book I’ve read so far in 2023.

4 1/2 stars rounded up to 5

Dang, this book is SO many things, I don't even know how to talk about it. It's climate change dystopia, but also satirical and I love that the publisher describes it as "tragicomic satire" and "eco-thriller" because I think those are really the perfect descriptions.

I don't even want to tell you too much about this book, but let's just say it involves eating bugs, lots of snakes, and a country that's getting hotter and hotter thanks to global warming. It focuses mainly on one family (though it took me a minute to see how they were all related), some of them in Florida and some of them in California. I'd say it's not for the faint of heart and though it manages to be super readable and even funny in lots of ways, it's also pretty terrifying and depressing at its heart. I feel like it's tough to write a book that can be all these things at once, so kudos to the author.

While I did really enjoy the book, I felt like the last 25% or so wasn't as a strong as the rest of the book and this was a tad disappointing. But I'm still giving it 4 1/2 stars because overall, it's really good. I highly recommend the audiobook as the narrator is great and sucked me right in.

Blue Skies was my first T.C. Boyle book, so I can't compare it to his others, but it certainly wants to make me read more.

I’ve never read climate change dystopian literature before but I have read TC Boyle so I was looking forward to it. I know it’s meant to be satire but this feels like it could be 10 years from now and that gave me some anxiety. However, the book ends on a hopeful note. Perhaps there will be blue skies ahead?

3.5⭐️ because I didn’t really love the narrator. She is ok but I don’t know that she’s the right voice for this book.

Thank you to NetGalley for my review copy.

This was so much fun! It was scary and extremely sad -Sierra!
I felt all of it. Was it right now or the distant future? It doesn't matter. We are headed that way. These things are happening.
Mom is making insect suppers, sister is keeping large pythons in the house with her infants, and brother is missing a limb. They are all coping.
I loved it all.
The narrator is one of my favorites. I loved her performance.

TC Boyle’s writing is as clever as ever and his story as darkly funny. His brilliantly depressing premise : Climate change won’t actually change us, is, I fear, exactly right, and he nails it with his well written characters and their sad but seemingly inevitable inability to do anything about their circumstances.
Some hope at the end allows the reader to finish without all optimism for our future to be lost. An incredibly thought provoking novel.

Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook. The audiobook was well done. The narrator did a very good job with male voices and the tones and quirks of all the different characters.

The book was well-written, but it was not one of the best climate fiction books I've read. The ways that the natural world can break down in the not so distant future are there, and this bicoastal family is set to experience the worst of it. The issue is that the characters have almost no interior life. They simply do things, and much of what they do is drink and make other questionable decisions. The constant drinking and lack of introspection blunts the characters' personalities and makes them unsympathetically flat-footed in the face of imminent tragedies. I think this lack of interior life also allows the author to dump tragedy upon tragedy on the characters, since the reader has not bonded with them. I understand the author is trying to say that people are silly and are so divorced from the natural world as to be incapable of dealing with this, but I kept finding myself trying to find connections with the characters, only to be thwarted at every turn. The descriptions of the animals and the weather are more vivid than the descriptions of the people.

Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle
⭐⭐✨

Thank you to #netgalley for the gifted copy of this book for review.

T.C. Boyle is a humorist and I picked this up expecting a satirical take on the slow devastation wrought by climate change. The seas are rising, pushing Florida homes into a watery grave. California is perpetually on fire without relief. Mass die offs of animals and insects occur without explanation. Yet, life goes on. People fall in love, fight, have children, have affairs, get married, go to school.

I think I missed the comedy here. I like bleak books but this was unrelentingly grim. The tragedies were deep and felt unrelated to the destruction that was occurring. The reactions to them underdeveloped. For me, the redemptive part of this book was that it captured that feeling that we have all had where horrifying things are happening and yet we still have to take out the trash or go to work. Humans have to continue the mundane in the wake of the extraordinary.

TW for death of a child that knocked me cold.

I loved this, such a funny book with a veiled deep and important message of climate change. Every single character was so engaging and weird, very weird but in the best way. I had so much fun listening to this yet felt I learned a lot. I will definitely be checking out more by this author.

Blue Skies is like reading a AITA post, where the person is clearly the A**hole, except it's almost 400 pages and that all characters in the book are A**holes.

Blue Skies combines the story of a family, with all its family dramas, with the effects of climate change in our daily lives. There's Cat an entitled woman who dreams of being an influencer. Her fiancee turned husband who doesn't care about anyone except himself. Connor, Cat's brother, who also only cares about himself and his own happiness.

I am giving it two stars because I couldn't relate to any of the characters. To be honest, I was rooting for climate change these people are awful. Plus, there's no story here. There's no conflict, resolution, ending. The book just ends and I felt like something was still missing.

When T.C. Boyle hits for me, it’s 100. But, this one missed the mark. As usual, some heavy weirdness here and heavy eco commentary. But, the narrator was just meh, and the story, for its bizarre opening premise, was a bit slow to get going.