Weather by Jenny Offill
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Pages: 208
Published by Random House Audio
Publication Date February 11, 2020
Goodreads
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with her husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. She's become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still, she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
Weather is a unique look at one woman’s daily life and reminded me of Mrs. Dalloway. Unfortunately, it is not as memorable as Mrs. Dalloway. My main complaint is with the characters, they were just kind of forgettable. Lizzie was just kind of floundering through life, questioning pretty much everything and rude to boot. I just wanted to slap her across the face. As for the men in the story, I had to constantly remind myself of their relation to Lizzie (are they her husband, brother, or son). The writing style was a little too free-form for me. While it was very lyrical it also felt a bit pretentious.
Cassandra Campbell was the saving grace of the novel. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, her narration adds a spark to almost anything she reads. Her tone is soothing with impeccable inflection.
Overall, Weather was an interesting concept but it wasn’t my cup of tea.
So sorry, I hope your next book is better.