The protagonist of this book is an incurious, shallow and kind of vapid character, concerned by two things: what people look like, and how much she doesn’t know about the world around her.

There’s a scene late in the book where the protagoist reconnects with someone she knew when she was a teenager. He doesn’t recall her at all, and it sort of became clear that the author had intended for this character to be empty and a bit of a non-entity. If this was an avatar for the reader, it didn’t work for me at all. If this was the author’s archetype for the typical white liberal woman, it’s a failure on that front as well. If it’s neither of these, then clearly I misread the book.

I think your enjoyment of this book will correlate with how likeable or tolerable you find her.

I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but it really didn’t. I guess the core of this book is hypocrisy – all of us progressives who worry about climate change and fossil fuel consumption but go about our lives and jobs anyway.

The writing was great – even when it felt like things were going nowhere, I wasn’t bored. Maybe I’m too old for this book.