Blue Skies

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like jewelry, living jewelry to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young Burmie she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival. n n Brilliantly imaginative . . . in a terrifying way (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle's finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family--including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd--are struggling to adapt to the new normal, in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope. n n But there's more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet's future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which the only truism seems to be that things always get worse. n n An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle's Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.