weather noun
: the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time
weather transitive verb
: to come safely through a difficult period or experience

“First, they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not a coral.”

I loved every minute of Jenny Offill’s Weather. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, thanks to its choppy style, specific brand of humour and refusal to deliver conventional narrative movement, but I thought it was brilliant.

This novel is both sardonic and warm, reflective of our anxious times but also strangely reassuring. It’s got wit and wisdom and a fantastic narrative voice in librarian Lizzie.

There are plot threads—Lizzie meets an attractive stranger; supports her addict brother; works as an assistant for the charismatic Sylvia who hosts a climate change podcast called “Hell or High Water”; becomes obsessed with doomsday preppers—but these threads don't go very far. This is a novel more concerned with potentialities, the tension of the time before, of something about to happen. This extends not just to domestic worries, but an impending existential doom.

Inaction and indecision permeate Weather, as does the ‘incredulity response’: the human tendency to freeze up in crises, the brain unable to take in what is happening. As much as this novel delights in absurdity, its comedy is freighted with darkness.

“A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but (the turtle) couldn’t help them. “It all happened so fast,” he said.”

Wise and very funny and heartbreaking and completely unique. This book is about motherhood, climate change, marriage, depression and so much more. I will read everything that Jenny Offill writes!

Once again, this author has written an unusual, off beat and highly original book. She is a skilled observer of human behavior with a wicked wit, and the book is both enjoyable and though provoking

I love books like this! It doesn't have a plot or characters that develop but it is a book that speaks to the reader and chimes with their thoughts, fears and social responsibility.
The main character is a librarian who works in an academic library. She has a husband and son and initially you could get the feeling that this is similar to Elizabeth Strout's Olive novels - passing judgement on her patrons, friends and family - but Weather is more kind-hearted.
I found it to be a miscellany on the state of the USA, covering US election despondency and its fallout, and the world in general. Small paragraphs follow the main character's interactions at home and work and are filled with thoughts on climate change, technology, social preoccupations. It also offers snippets of survivalist information and some witty sayings and jokes.

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying "You are mad, you are not like us"

If you like Monica Ali's Seasons Quartet you will like this.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This was not a hard read, but a challenging one. Offill's fragmented style means a fair amount of concentration is needed to keep up with the narrative, even though the shortness of the prose means you can read the book fairly quickly. This is also a book underpinned by worries about the climate change emergency - a low level of anxiety permeates the narrative and I think it encapsulates the current attitude of most people towards the issue, which is anxiety with a level of apathy, because what can we really do? The comparison of this period of time to the time before a war starts also felt quite on the nose. This book is a short read but it feels like an important one.

This is a superb, unconventional read focusing on so many things it is difficult to know where to start. Offill's novella focuses on the character of Elizabeth and her work in a library - plus the writing she does for Sylvia, a psychologist, which results in some quirky, fairly odd replies to people who contact her.

Many might think that 'Weather' is disjointed; that its unusual structure, ranging from introspection from Elizabeth, through to corny, albeit out-of-context, jokes about dentists and moths, to learning more about the work, or lack of, that Elizabeth's husband does/doesn't do, to her drug-addled brother, and the astute qualities of Ely, her son. There - my sentence itself speaks volumes!

Running through the whole story is a dystopian theme - and more specifically, climate change, very current, and how it is impacting on the world, or what it might do in the future. Offill writes about such serious topics with brevity - but also with such skill.

In short, then, what this book does is quite incredible - it crams a lot into so few pages. One thing that really struck me was the way readers learn so much about characters - not through explicit description but through implication and hints. This is no mean feat but definitely makes for a superb read and one that's hard to fault.

I found myself so caught up in the flow of life and thought that I lost sight of the fact it would ever end (easy to do on a kindle)

Some utterly wonderful passages and phrases in this - to the extent that I stopped to absorb them and reread.

Absorbing and fascinating, akin to living in someone else’s mind for a while.

I don't deny that there are many clever observations in the book and that it is a poignant, often funny snapshot of America in 2016 (and much shorter than Ducks, Newburyport(. But I have the same issues with it as I had with Dept. of Speculation: this is fragmentary bits and pieces which are supposed to have a purpose but often feel simply like lazy writing. I need more of an overarching theme or plot to keep the book together. I suppose this is designed to be an example of the constellation novel that Tokarczuk writes so well, but it is too small, too much grounded in one person's point of view, to achieve that.

I read Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation recently and loved it, so I was really excited to be able to read her new book before its release next month. And I liked this too but it didn’t quite have the same narrative punch as her earlier novel, although there is still an element of experimental stream-of-consciousness that I love. What I did find really interesting about Weather was that it is a book (somewhat) about climate change not from a scientific perspective but just from a protagonist (and presumably an author) experiencing life in a climate emergency.

I don't mind novels in verse or written in an impressionist style. Sadly, there is little beauty or innovation in the way in which Weather is written. To me, there is nothing poetic about its disjointed and fragmented prose (so much so that to call it prose seems a stretch).
Here are two extracts which other readers may appreciate, but I certainly didn't:

“We were at the supermarket. All around us things tried to announce their true nature. But their radiance was faint and fainter still beneath the terrible music.”


“The window in our bedroom is open. You can see the moon if you lean out and crane your neck. The Greeks thought it was the only heavenly object similar to Earth. Plants and animals fifteen times stronger than our own inhabited it.”


“There is a heroic tower of folded things on the table. I spot my favorite shirt, my least depressing underwear. I go into the bedroom and change into them. Now I am a brand-new person.”

This is a sort of ‘state of the nation’ address from one woman in New York going about her daily life, her thoughts and reflections mirroring the preoccupations of those around her. Civilisation’s decline and climate emergency are two of the main themes, highlighted by a new and very different president and political style. Her musings on these are interspersed with worries about her family, her marriage, her child, and observations of her customers at the library where she works, people she meets in the course of her day and those who write in to her friend’s online show. A highly effective structure involving short, sharp anecdotes, reminiscences, old jokes that spring to mind, the kind of mental shorthand acquired over a long marriage - all these appealed to me and felt as close as could be to the way my own mind works in the course of an average day.

No real action here, this is a novel of observations and a distillation of people’s feelings about the world today. A joy to read, highly recommended. I haven’t read the author’s earlier novel, Dept. of Speculation, and am now keen to read that and all her back catalogue as soon as possible.

Thank you to netgalley for the opportunity to read this ARC. It is a short book told in a stream of conscience style which works for the story of this dysfunctional family. The title Weather is meant to be a clever analogy to the ever changing ways every person behaves. even when it couldn’t have been predicted they would do so. Lizzie, our narrator, is a librarian who, not unlike many of us, has found that navigating her way in these distrumpain times makes everything more difficult, more emotional. She doubts her decisions. She takes on a ridiculous job for her friend Sylvia who is so stuck inside her own head it is hard to imagine wanting to be her friend. Lizzie has a sense of humor. She also has a brother whose life is anything but humorous. The book was an enjoyable quick read, but there were no WOW moments. Nothing that provoked me or caused me to think a little deeper.

I requested this book from NetGalley because I am interested in weather and I liked the cover and the synopsis, but was I reading the same book as everyone else?
The book was told in little snippets is the best way I can describe it. It jumped so frequently from one subject to another that I never found my way into the book.
The people were unlikeable and forgettable. Then the book ended, but there was no conclusion to anything.
A seriously disappointing read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for my ARC in return for an honest review.

I am a big fan of Dept. of Speculation, and I had high hopes for this book. & those hopes were met!

It is a step further than Dept. of Speculation, definitely sadder and maybe a little bit more complicated - or at least, broader in scope. Still with moments of dry humour, but also a lot of moments of really sad shit.

Good reading for: someone who asks you when you're having kids, and can't seem to articulate the connection between not having kids and the growth of XR? or someone who read a lot of old poetry or Victorian novels this last year and doesn't get how you can make art from modern politics. or maybe to be read alongside Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.

quirky, weird and strange. I just couldn't get in to this one for some reason, although i enjoyed her other books. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher.

At the heart of this novel is a deeply charming and sympathetic character who drives the narrative on. Thoroughly enjoyable read thanks to her.

I love how Jenny Offill takes the every day and makes it otherwordly. She's one of those writers who can shed new light on the most mundane things and render them beautiful. Weather is imbued with her customary poetic touch - although it's a short book, there is plenty here to make you stop and think.

There is no plot to speak of, and there were times when I found the leaps in character and subject matter a bit too jarring. It was only when a continuous storyline started to take shape about halfway through that I began to have a sense of time and structure. There were a few times I caught myself re-reading sentences, trying to feel my way through the narrative.

Weather is at its best when it muses over its great themes: climate change, survival and hope. This is profound and fresh socio-political commentary at its most deconstructed, perceptions of every day life held up to the light.

I never know what to say about her books. She's great at small moments that speak to the core of what it means to be alive.

I find her thought provoking and accomplished but I come away kinda wishing for more of a traditional narrative from her as much as I enjoy her small fragments.

A brief quotation at the beginning of this thoughtful, poetic novel reminds us, I think, of an earlier time when the American people were more certain of, and more comfortable with, their relationship with the earth upon which they lived out their everyday lives. It reads:

NOTES FROM A TOWN MEETING IN MILFORD, CONNECTICUT, 1640
Voted, that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted that we are the Saints.

But here in the twenty-first century things are very different for Lizzie, a librarian, mother and all-round caring person. We all know a Lizzie. Her life is perhaps typical of the lives of many women of her age around the world. Constantly struggling to meet the conflicting demands on her time, her attention and her compassion she has little time for her own needs. Torn between her husband, her precocious son and his schooling, her troubled, unstable brother, her ageing mother, and, not least, her work and colleagues, Lizzie appears to live in a constant state of anxiety, fearful of failing them all:

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t seem to stop making bad decisions. The weird thing is they don’t sneak up on me. I can see them coming all the way down the pike.

And there’s this lovely, wry admission of her maternal anxiety:

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person.
He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.

There is also a sense of under-achievement about Lizzie, a sense of unfulfilled potential. She dropped out of grad school many years before and it was her tutor, Sylvia, that helped her get her position at the library even though she is not properly qualified for the job. Sylvia is an environmentalist with a doom-filled podcast and speaking engagements. Lizzie doubles as her assistant, travelling with her and answering the e-mails she receives from doom-filled right-wing evangelicals and left-wing environmentalists alike.

The central character’s busy, disjointed life is reflected in the episodic, fragmentary nature of this novel. The reader jumps from brief snippets of conversations, to brief scenes of domestic life and social interaction. From survivalist tips to whimsical asides. And there are even jokes:

We don’t serve time travelers here.
A time traveler walks into the bar.

The author combines our fear of climate change and global environmental disaster with the apocalyptic attitudes of the American religious right and then mixes it with our new-found unease with the post-truth, fake news Trumpian politics that has unfolded before us in recent years. There is a sense that this is a novel of living in the End Times. But the dry humour and lightness of touch in the writing lifts this novel from being merely one that charts our current sense of disquiet and foreboding to one that captures what it is to be alive in these constantly changing, rather unnerving times.

Jenny Offill shows us that there is indeed much fear and anxiety in our modern lives but also that there is laughter and even consolation to be found in them as well. She shows us that there is beauty in everyday life; that there is poetry in the mundane.

Intimate and immediate, Weather is a short novel about how our environmentally, politically and socially fractured world affects Lizzie and those around her. Written in fragments, sometimes everyday observations or conversations, sometimes deeper thoughts that keep Lizzie awake at night, worrying about the future, for her son, for her addict brother now with a daughter of his own, for her mother who has no savings.

It is funny and sad and very human. It is also thought provoking and intelligent, a timely book. Highly recommended.

My thanks to Granta Publications and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Weather.