INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation—one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year—a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters … promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.
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This is so good. We are not ready nor worthy.
Rating:
Genre: Literary Fiction
I don’t know how to review this book! It has no defined plot. It felt like a person blogging on one of the social media platforms about her life and problems. It was just like a diary written in short paragraphs. A stream of consciousness. Sometimes things made sense and were quite quirky, other times it felt frustrating as I was trying to make up a story in my mind from the “notes” the author has written. Many times it felt to me that this was a nonfiction book and that the author was the actual narrator and she was just telling me about her own life which is not the case.
The story is about Lizzie, a married university librarian with a son. The narrator keeps jumping from a subject to another, normal life annoyances, climate change, political opinions, etc. So I don’t think these subjects were given their fair due in this short book and with this kind of narration style. On the cover, it says “a novel” but I don’t think I have read a novel! I can’t recommend it.
Lovely.
An entertaining and occasionally haunting commentary on the world we live in today, built from little flashes of a continuing story and jokes and such. It feels appropriate to our fragmented and ghoulish reality. Climate change is a big theme, and it’s post Trump, though pre-pandemic. It’s a fast read and I recommend it if you don’t mind heroines who aren’t perfect and if you also can appreciate a break from more traditional novel formats.
not for everybody… but if it IS for you it’s a fun ride, though a bit dark at times
Dumb. There is no story or plot, The main character and the supporting characters wander through life in various stages of pain, misery and idiocy. This is not a novel. I’m not sure what it is, except it’s not very good.
I enjoyed the book but didn’t love it. I felt at times the main characters thoughts where out of control it was hard to follow. The writing style flowed well and the author was clever in her way of her wording, i just felt at times i had to make more of an effort to concentrate.
Jenny Offill is a poet, capturing the feel of how many of us live today, between distraction and looming anxiety.
Jenny Offill writes beautiful sentences; she is also a deft curator of silences. It’s this counterpoint of eloquence and felt absence that enables her to register the emotional and political weather of our present.
Jenny Offill conjures entire worlds with her steady, near-pointillist technique. One feels a whole heaving, breathing universe behind her every line. Dread, the sensation of sinking, lostness, and being cast away from any sense of safety infiltrates every interaction and private moment in this book, like ashes from the burning world she describes.
Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore — they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.
There is no doubt that Jenny Offill is the writer for this particular historical moment. Weather is a tour de force of her considerable and startling gifts: the compressed and gorgeous sentences, the astounding comic timing, the profound and wise surprises. The miracle of this novel is how it looks at our contradictions and conditions with such bracing honesty and yet gives us a tender hopefulness toward these fraught humans. Offill makes us feel implicated but also loved.