A really fresh and interesting read. The author has a strong message, but the narrative is so well developed it is almost like stealth environmentalism.

I loved seeing Melbourne in print, too. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This book follows six main characters’ lives mostly leading up to and then through the massive bushfires of 2019/20 and then into the COVID lockdowns. It’s a strange one to review because it’s pretty meandering in places and there’s not really a plot, it’s more about how the characters are surviving through life, their families, relationships (past and present) and navigating through life as they react (or not ) to climate change and other issues like cancel culture. I was quite drawn to the book and enjoyed reading it.

3.5 Stars

The Temperature by Katerina Gibson is a beautifully written, piercing examination of the divide in Australian society with the looming crisis of climate change growing more urgent, not only in our collective psyches, but our collective realities.

I am disappointed I did not love it more. This kind of book is normally my jam with interesting characters and ideas explored but I often found I had to force myself to keep reading or pick it up again.

While I was reading, I was comparing it (maybe unfairly) to other books I'd read with a slightly similar 'essence' such as The Overstory by Richard Powers, Clade by James Bradley and Everything Feels Like The End Of The World by Else Fitzgerald. And what these books had that I found the Temperature lacked was how compelling they were and how connected I felt to the characters.

I kept getting pulled out of the story. There was often little asides or sentences that seemed to pile up explaining, re-explaining and further explaining the same concept or feeling. Which stylistically is a choice and one I can often get on board with, but in this book I found for me it ran interference with the pace and flow of the story and created distance for me to connect fully with the characters. It felt like the narration inserted itself to much at times. Sometime it felt didactic. All the sharp and cutting insights and opinions keep telling me how I should think and feel at any given moment, instead of allowing me to infer my own meaning and insights.

It took me about half way through (once we got into Tomas's section) for me to feel more immersed in the story, and then parts of the second half of the book felt harder again. Structurally, I'm not sure it worked. While the characters are interlinked in different ways, being pulled from point of view to point of view in sections didn't make for a compelling reading experience. I feel it may have been more compelling for me if the stories were interwoven through the years, rather than each characters stories in sections.

I admire this book and what it was doing. I just didn't enjoy reading it as much as I thought I would. The issues and characters within this books pages are explored with depth and compassionate insight into humanity. The writing is beautiful with some truly stunning prose. I wouldn't be surprised if this author also writes poetry with some of the imagery they evoked. There was also some funny insights that made we laugh. My favourite being: "Trust a man to think himself God in the throes of copulation."

While The Temperature might not have ticked all the boxes for me, I'd still be interested to ready more from this author.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Australia for an ARC copy of this book for my honest review.