In David Guenette’s climate fiction novel OVER BROOKLYN HILLS: The Steep Climes Quartet (Book Three), global temperatures have risen by an average of 1.7 degrees by 2035. Marion Fletcher, Great Barrington's manager in Berkshire County, finds it hard to keep the town running smoothly due to a sudden influx of backpackers who are trying to escape a fatal heatwave in the South. The crime rate is at an all-time high, and the town’s pre-existing housing crisis forces backpackers to live in temporary accommodations—leading citizens of Great Barrington to feel threatened in their own town. Meanwhile, weapons technician Allan Randolph comes to terms with the knowledge that the climate action terrorist organization he has dedicated his youth to may no longer be true to its cause.
Guenette succeeds at painting a very realistic picture of climate change and its impact on society in this novel. The crisis is not dramatically catastrophic or dystopian. The panic is not immediate but revealed through the gradual destabilization of the town and the world's overall political landscape: extreme heatwaves, the political unrest between India and Pakistan, the housing crisis in Berkshire County, etc. The in-depth exploration of climate-related subject matter is a testament to the author's thorough research, including the detailed rendition of Hurricane Josephine’s devastation of Miami Beach in 2029.
The individual stories are brought to a satisfactory conclusion towards the end of the novel, but the initial chapters are dense and information-heavy. For the first half of the book, nothing takes place in real time. While the unfolding of events through news articles makes for a realistic and nuanced depiction of climate disasters, retrospective reflections of characters’ life stories fail to ground their emotional conflicts.
Guenette’s unorthodox stylistic choice of leaning into layered sentence structure and a heavily parenthetical prose style weakens the reading experience: “Of course, she immediately—and graciously, she hopes—accepted said surrender, and named the now ex-publisher-editor as Berkshire Interactive’s new galleries editor—on a freelance basis, of course—and has been courting the several advertisers.” The prose also lacks fluidity; it moves between information-dense, tech jargon-heavy phrases like “delimitators in the hold pool” and conversational reflections like this: “In fact, he’s only come to know this expression after a colleague used it in his summary of Jimmy’s far-too-long set of complaints during one meeting months ago. Meow.”
The wide cast of characters makes it difficult to keep track of the plot, and the individual narratives are initially disjointed. However, Guenette does succeed at bringing them all to a satisfactory resolution. How much that matters will depend on the individual reader's amount of patience.
Despite its very realistic portrayal of climate change, David Guenette’s OVER BROOKLYN HILLS: The Steep Climes Quartet (Book Three) proves to be an underwhelming reading experience because of its wide cast of characters, dense narrative, and weak prose.
~ Maria Zafar for IndieReader