We Are Unprepared

"They think they are doing the right thing and have the right idea, but as millennials in a climate-impacted world they are “unprepared,” as the title aptly puts it. Notice the title is “We Are Unprepared,” rather than “We Are Not Prepared.” There’s a subtle difference. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As the story unfolds, the couple and their friends find out that even in idyllic, rural, hippie Vermont, chaos, disintegration and mixed signals reign. Reilly’s book is a cli-fi novel of the current moment, set in the present. A major east coast storm, remnants of a hurricane, turns Vermont upside down. That’s a good way to put it. The very act of putting pen to paper is a kind of activism for some writers, yes. In Reilly’s case, earlier in her life she worked as a policy wonk in Washington DC in the Bill Clinton administration. There, she rubbed elbows with government officials, sat in on high-level staff meetings and socialized after work with power players with close ties to Clinton. Then she left the world of politics and Washington games, and decided to move to her native state of Vermont and write a novel. A climate-themed novel, it turned out, and the result was We Are Unprepared . She wanted to use literature, literary fiction, to make a difference, if books can ever really make a difference in society at large. So yes, like Robinson in Australia, Reilly was doing activism as literature. She did media interviews, went on a book tour and spoke as a guest author at Washington bookstores. The inside Washington policy wonk was now a book person, trading places to become a Washington outsider."