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. 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. 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. 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.
