Elyse is an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid is a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. When the seemingly fulfilling lives of these distanced childhood friends are shaken, everything they’ve carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. This outer unraveling mirrors a growing discomfort with their safe lives. For Elyse, it begins with a mundane moment at the grocery store and a news story about polar bears. For Astrid, it happens during a faculty reception where a visiting lecturer’s talk sparks a rift with her mentor and father figure.
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crisis in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
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