PositiveThe NationWeather is definitely not what I’d call entertaining; it’s a beach read for those who like to worry about the beaches. But the book also poses a set of important questions to us. If pop culture asks us to find the fun in human extinction, then Weather does the opposite, insisting that we take seriously the frazzled, burned-out experience of living when you know we’re all in for a very bad time ... Weather’s plot is scant ... The usual dramatic beats you’d find in a domestic novel—fights, cheating, divorce—get skipped. The book’s foreboding tone leads us to expect something bad will happen, but not much happens at all ... In part, that’s because the worst has already happened—in real life, to all of us ... Offill skirts many of the difficulties of portraying climate change by not portraying it at all. This is a pre-apocalyptic novel, and its subject is dread, not disaster ... Where action’s concerned, we mostly watch Lizzie go to work, pick up the mail, and clean mouse crap off her spice rack ... Is Weather just an exercise in highbrow bourgeois hand-wringing? Is reading—and for that matter, writing—empathetic stories while the world warms any better than watching zombie movies or posting Tide Pod memes? ... A more productive way to read Weather might be to understand its dread as willfully exhausting and useless. By the end of the book, it’s impossible to think that worrying alone is going to solve anything. At the very least, dread implies a desire to live, and many of us who have done enough worrying are ready to hit the streets.