It’s got wit and wisdom and a fantastic narrative voice in librarian Lizzie.

This novel is both sardonic and warm, reflective of our anxious times but also strangely reassuring. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, thanks to the choppy style, specific brand of humour and refusal to deliver conventional narrative movement, but I thought it was brilliant. “First they came for the coral, but I did not say anything because I was not a coral.” : to come safely through a difficult period or experience : the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in-funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad. 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. 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.Īs 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.

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.

For years, she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree.

Weather offill review