The Fish by Joanne Stubbs is a slow burn of a book that looks at the havoc climate change is creating and the various ways we, as humans, deal (or not) with it.

With a lot of novels that address climate change there is a big moment where even the most reluctant people finally have to do something, even if it is just run away. This story more closely resembles what we are doing and, unfortunately, will continue to do. Little things to adapt, try to warn people, basically just learn to live in the new norm. The problem is that as change occurs more and more rapidly, there never really is a new norm. We can change crops, this season, but no guarantee they will grow next season (if there is still a recognizable season).

Nature, here represented by the fish, adapts in a forward direction. Humans try to maintain that which is no longer sustainable. Call it hubris, call it stubbornness, call it stupidity. It doesn't matter, change will overtake us as we continue to think we can either control it or avoid it.

For me, this is what the novel drives home. We stay so focused on our day-to-day, making the barest of changes to deal with what is happening, while those changes have already moved beyond our adjustments. These are people just like us. Young and old, climate change deniers and those who acknowledge it but don't know what to do about it, urban, suburban, and rural. We are these characters, and we are being overrun by a situation we have known about for decades but have done next to nothing about. Are we to feel sorry for our species as much as we feel sorry for these individuals? They didn't really bring all this down on themselves, but the larger they, the we of our world, did.

This is a work I would recommend to those who have read the action-driven works about climate change and wonder about that same scenario but from the perspective of the common person's daily life and the disruptions at that scale. Three locations looked at here, yet they speak to the entire planet.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )