The novel’s laser focus is on our present moment, and reading The Displacements is like bingeing a monthslong news cycle in six hours. It plods along boasting all the shock and awe of constant updates, yet by the end the narrative seems canned. There are bad characters and good ones; the latter either learn their lessons in time or are martyred victims of circumstance. The climax involves flying bullets and tornadoes. Then the clouds part, revealing a somewhat sunnier financial situation for the Larsen-Halls than previously forecast ... Although the novel’s subjects could not be more important, its suffocating eventfulness doesn’t leave room for much besides America’s steadily swelling storm. There are stoked resentments and greedy politicians and heartless corporate actors and sociologists and artists and enough guns to outnumber them all. Each is viewed through the lens of a spiraling speculative logic in which disaster is about to happen, has already happened and is happening, all at once. The air is heavy from the start, making the tragedies that do occur in the narrative so light they drift above our heads ... This sort of atmosphere usually prevails in the media, rather than in the pages of a novel. It’s increasingly possible to pass a good deal of one’s time scrolling through the worst moments of other people’s lives, as if the eye of the hurricane is a sort of dance partner one must keep in step with. In this way The Displacements is a thorough translation to fiction of what it can feel like to live right now. It’s hypnotic, it’s upsetting, there are stakes, you still haven’t been blown away.

... cinematic ... shines when it portrays alliances and factions amid the mass of people so suddenly brought together ... Too often the novel is beset by sloppy clichés (smiles flash, jaws stiffen) and disaster-movie dialogue...Yet The Displacements raises other, deeper questions about the place and purpose of “cli-fi.” What is gained or lost when a mainstream novel about mass migration after a mega-storm chooses to center the tribulations of an affluent white family – when we know that our climate emergency disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including the poor and people of color? Does this novel’s 'riches to rags' story convey the actual potential harm of a fictional storm like Luna? Or does the author wish to reach a reading population who might still believe in a 'normal' that can, or should, return? ... These questions, more than the Larsen-Halls’s journey, make The Displacements a book worth picking up.

Holsinger has built an apocalyptic plot on ground more secure than the foundations of many Miami homes ... Holsinger brings the cost of climate change home ... I gripped the covers of this book as though it might be blown from my hands. Indeed, the disaster that The Displacements whips up isn’t just powerful enough to smear Miami off the map; it’s powerful enough to wipe away our naive confidence that such a disaster isn’t coming for us ... If Holsinger is as subtle as a category 6 hurricane, he also twists his novel around a strange tension: While mocking the elitism that marks our national response to natural disasters, he’s also exploiting that elitism for dramatic effect. This is, after all, a work of suburban horror carefully engineered to scratch the anxieties of upper-middle-class White readers...In such self-conscious moments, The Displacements feels as though it’s deconstructing itself, challenging not just Daphne’s privilege but its own ... And Holsinger offers incisive speculation about the way such an existential crisis might reshape our political rhetoric and create a new class of 'undeserving' refugees to disdain and cut off.

Holsinger takes on the impending climate crisis in this new addition to the burgeoning cli-fi genre...A record category 6 hurricane is projected to hit Miami with very little advance notice...The Larsen-Hall family prepares for the quick evacuation of their $2 million dollar home as the patriarch and main provider, Dr. Brantley Hall, is rushed away to accompany a medivac evacuation...The family of two young children, a 19-year-old stepson, and a dog is subsequently led by wife and mother Daphne, who inadvertently leaves all their monetary resources in her purse on the driveway to be washed away along with the whole of the city...The resulting displaced mass of humanity from two devastated American cities makes its way to megashelters erected at various locations across flyover states...Holsinger collects America’s flaws and scant empathy in this breakneck novel. Issues of opioid addiction, toxic masculinity, microaggressions, and limited resource-sharing make for compressed yet monumental circumstances within the perimeter of Tooley Farm...This bleak but resilient view of a harsh future surely entertains, and it also hearkens to hope.

When the world’s first Category 6 storm destroys Miami and Houston, a FEMA megashelter in Oklahoma becomes part of the setting for the harsh aftermath, measured in unraveling lives...Holsinger's lush writing about the storm is complemented by 'The Great Displacement: A Digital Chronicle of the Luna Migration,' an interactive website including interview transcripts, maps, and charts, displayed here as screenshots...Interspersed with these reports are chapters telling Daphne’s story as well as those of her three difficult children (her teenage stepson, Gavin, maliciously leaves her purse in the driveway when they flee); the African American woman who runs Tooley Farm for FEMA; the drug dealer/insurance agent who is there to squeeze every penny he can get out of the refugees; and his sidekick/girlfriend, a guitar player who starts the cover band that gives the book its title...Brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly believable. Seems destined to be a blockbuster.

In Holsinger’s harrowing novel of environmental disaster, an unprecedented category 6 hurricane obliterates Miami and disrupts a once-charmed family...Before the storm hits, Daphne Larsen-Hall has a great life—pampered wife of a wealthy surgeon, with a two-million-dollar home in Coral Gables and two bright children, Oliver and Mia...But after Hurricane Luna, Daphne’s life is upended...Holsinger does a good job exploring the country’s cultural and economic divisions and the effects of climate change, and is even better with the characters and their ever-mounting problems...This story of displacement and desperation packs a wallop.