Weather (Offill) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic—the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement—and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do. Weather is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son's backpack and putting away the dog's "slobber frog," a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son's backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children.
Leslie Jamison - New York Times Book Review


[M]elancholy and satirical…Offill has genuine gifts as a comic novelist. Weather is her most soulful book, as well…. Offill's humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible…utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence…luminous.
Boston Globe


Genius…. [A] lapidary masterwork…. Remarkable and resonant…. The right novel for the end of the world.
Los Angeles Times


(Starred review) A librarian becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday preparations…. Lizzie’s apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.
Publishers Weekly


Lizzie Benson, a librarian…[is] barely able to spend time with her husband and son as she fusses over her devout mother and addict brother…. [E]ventually Lizzie must look to the larger world and recognize that she can't save everyone—though she keeps trying.
Library Journal


Another crisply revelatory portrait of a marriage and family in flux…. Offill…performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from "tipping into the abyss."
Booklist


(Starred review) [C]lever and seductive…. The tension between mundane daily concerns and looming apocalypse, the "weather" of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor.
Kirkus Reviews