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A novel

By: Jenny Offill

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation—one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year—a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis

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 husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has 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.

“Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun…” —The New York Times

Probably Perfect for Most People

I’m don’t cuss and am pretty conservative so I didn’t like the use of the “F” word.

Interesting book. Audible if you’re reading this, get more narrators.

I enjoyed the book but I have a really hard time with Cassandra Campbell’s narration. And Audible uses her SO MUCH. I’m sure she’s a lovely person but surely there can be more variety! It’s the bright clipped voice that seems inappropriate for some of these heavier books.

More Short Story than Novel

I was not the greatest fan of this book. It sounded very interesting, and it started out promising. However, the further into it I got the more I realized the story structure didn’t agree with me. There are essentially two plot lines whose nexuses are the narrator and the fact climate change is happening. These could have been two distinct short stories. Combining them in this way made for a confusing listen. The story flips from one to another without warning. Having seen the printed book, the structure likely makes more sense in that format. All this said, the narration is top notch.

audio cutting out!!

Great book. is the audio cutting out for all of you? Every couple paragraphs the narrator misses a word --_--

is it good

I guess. what is this book? are we all lost in the wilderness? is that Italian girl Natasha reading this book?