Cli-Fi books | David Guenette

Kirkus Weighs In On Over Brooklyn Hills

David Guenette — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:29:23 +0000

Kirkus, one of the venerable editorial reviewer sources, thought pretty well of Over Brooklyn Hills, I’m happy to say. Of course, you can read the review yourself here in this post, or go online to the Kirkus site itself.

Here’s my favorite line from the Kirkus review of Over Brooklyn Hills:

Guenette’s attention to the ways in which climate change may affect communities at the local level makes for a compelling read, and the writing is zippy and clean.

On the other hand, the Kirkus reviewer chose to highlight the review with the following quote:

A few too many ideas prove distracting in this otherwise prescient and compelling near-future climate exploration.

Kirkus, one of the venerable editorial reviewer sources, thought pretty well of Over Brooklyn Hills, I’m happy to say. Of course, you can read the review yourself here in this post, or go online to the Kirkus site itself.

A mixed compliment, seems like, but overall the review was a good one. You can judge this for yourself, reading the review in full:

OVER BROOKLYN HILLS, THE STEEP CLIMES QUARTET, BOOK THREE

A few too many ideas prove distracting in this otherwise prescient and compelling near-future climate exploration.

In the near future, the Berkshires weather a strain on resources resulting from climate displacement in Guenette’s ecological novel.

It’s now 2035 in the third book of the author’s Steep Climes quartet. This novel follows a large cast of characters in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as they deal with an influx of tourists and “climate refugees” (read: “Brooklyn hipsters” traveling to the mountains to beat the heat). It’s troubling that hikers on the Appalachian Trail are arriving earlier in the season; the town simply isn’t ready for the throngs of New Yorkers who descend on the Berkshires during a scorching heat wave that July and August. The residents must respond to the high demand for vacation rentals, food, and space as crowds of tent-dwelling urbanites (“They’re sleeping on the sidewalks!”) arrive. The novel tracks the tensions between local policymakers, NIMBY protesters against housing expansion, and struggling workers who must meet rising rent costs or else be forced to live in tents. Davin Caine, a septuagenarian artist and homeowner in Great Barrington, rents out parts of his house to various boarders to pay the bills while investigating what—or who—is taking radishes from his garden. The expansive cast of characters also includes a journalist getting the scoop on dark money funding climate denialism, the town manager looking into mysterious gunshots while recovering from a messy split with her husband, and an online newspaper entrepreneur hoping to expand her business. Guenette’s attention to the ways in which climate change may affect communities at the local level makes for a compelling read, and the writing is zippy and clean. The author struggles somewhat with the difficult job of balancing several different stories, and some plot points fall to the wayside. Going beyond local concerns, Guenette also includes chapters about an eco-terrorist organization in cahoots with Mexican drug cartels, a narrative that warrants its own, dedicated novel.

A few too many ideas prove distracting in this otherwise prescient and compelling near-future climate exploration.

The storyline that the reviewer seems to be saying was one storyline too many–and yet, a good one–is the story of Alan Randolph, a No One is Safe cell member. Originally, the NOS character was a one-off, mainly to give readers some concrete sense of background for what would be recurring news items about the “climate terrorist” group that Davin and others see a couple of times in the course of Over Brooklyn Hills, but I ended up having so much fun writing the character who goes by “Maker,” his NOS codename, through most of the book.

Fun writing because the storyline of Maker/Alan Randolph required intricate plotting, and, sure, I love trying to figure out criminal behavior that is less likely to get the perpetrator caught, but the point of the NOS story through the second and third books is to explore what might happen if people get angry enough at the fossil fuel industry for cavalierly burning the world for more money. After all, the more we learn about the bad behavior of Big Oil, the angrier some are likely to get. There’s already plenty of bad behavior we know, including the industry’s supporting and funding climate denialism and delay, even while knowing for decades, through their own scientists, that global warming is an actual problem. Or all the influence buying, careless polluting; just the volume of leaking methane from a million “abandoned” wells across the world alone is a major problem, never mind the leaky pipes and spills from active natural gas and oil extraction and processing. Or the violence and maltreatment of disadvantaged people in the developing world, or, for that matter, the climate injustice visited mostly on poorer communities in our very own U.S.A.

The theme of Big Oil’s malfeasance is carried in other ways in Over Brooklyn Hills and the other books. In Over Brooklyn Hills’s 2035, there are hundreds of active lawsuits in the U.S. against fossil fuel corporations that are winding their way through the courts, with the end point in sight. Jimmy, Davin’s son, has been the IT guy for NoNolo, which is a legal document clearinghouse servicing many of these cases and there’s some shenanigans there, too.

But the various plot points mentioned above, while fun to write and fun to read, remain in service to the larger theme of the series, which is that any and all of us come to climate change through the lens of our own lives and we experience climate consequences mostly through the affect on our daily lives, whether in the form of costs or some type or other of corporeal engagement, which, in the above review, is referenced with the line “…what—or who—is taking radishes from his garden.”

Hey, but the book and write up your own review!

You can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format. You’ll find links for the other titles on the home page, too.

The post Kirkus Weighs In On Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Booklife Review of Over Brooklyn Hills

David Guenette — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:06:14 +0000

Booklife, part of the Publishers Weekly organization, just published a review of Over Brooklyn Hills, my third book of The Steep Climes Quartet. Over Brooklyn Hills published on Monday, June 15—today!

You can find Over Brooklyn Hills—Kindle and paperback—through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

For more information about The Steep Climes Quartet, see “Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet.”

Booklife Review:

The clear-eyed third entry in Guenette’s near-future series, set in the Berkshires in a 2035 of climate and refugee crises, stands out for Guenette’s singular blend of prognostication, rich characterization, slice-of-life scenecraft, process-oriented thriller elements, and deep interest in activism, journalism, governance, technological shifts, and the surprising ramifications of climate change. Guenette connects horrific global heatwaves to everyday existence around Great Barrington, Mass., which faces an escalating influx of transients, both the usual vacationers and desperate people seeking relief from the heat. In the midst of a housing crisis, the journalists and city administrators in Guenette’s sprawling cast fear—and will face—violence, but much of the novel explores, with keen understanding of interconnected systems, the practical challenges faced by the city, and changemakers on both sides of the law.

The cast, led by now-70-year-old artist/journalist Davin Caine, features a beleaguered town manager in a failing marriage; a freelance VR designer sleeping rough on Monument Mountain after Brooklyn becomes too hot; a climate activist building explosive devices for a domestic terror cell; and many more. Guenette writes convincing accounts of bomb-making, dealings with cartels, sniper assassinations, life on the run, and even the tracking of dark money political contributions, but the heart of the novel is in his detailed forecast of the world (and weather) to come. He builds a plausible 2035 with a light hand—offshore sea walls, news outlets charging micro-payments, drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail—and welcome focus on people’s lived experience.

The novel is structurally ambitious but also diffusive, with many pages giving to rumination. The strongest narrative momentum comes in chapters about Allen Randolph, the bomb-maker, and town manager Fletch, while Davin’s macular degeneration and attraction to his house sharer, Be, inspires the warmest and funniest writing—“Oh, jeez,” he says, when Be presses into him. Threads converge slowly but with intelligence and power. Newcomers will struggle to keep up, but old-hands will be moved as Guenette balances humanity and tension, hope and warning.

Takeaway: Incisive, humane near-future novel of the Berkshires in the climate crisis.

Great for fans of: Julia Glass’s Vigil Harbor, Lauren Groff’s Florida.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

The post Booklife Review of Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Over Brooklyn Hills is Now Available

David Guenette — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:33:59 +0000

On Monday, June 15 (2026), the third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, publishes from CMTI Publishing.

Here’s the front cover to Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, now in pre-order. This book takes place in 2035. Climate progress Democrats are back in power and progress is taking place. The fossil fuel industry is still fighting, of course, and one story line is that the law offices involved in over 100 different liability cases against Big Oil are simultaneously hacked, documents gone, threatening the legal cases. The global average temperature is still climbing, even while carbon emissions are modestly in decline. The climate terrorist group, No One is Safe, may be working with Mexican cartels, but one of NOS’s drone experts is having second thoughts.

The Steep Climes Quartet is a literary climate fiction series.

Why “literary”? Because the emphasis is on deeply drawn characters with which readers can identify across the many aspects of their own lives.

Why “climate fiction?” The series’ local characters live in a world with a changing climate across a two-decade-plus timeframe:

Kill Well takes place in 2026
Dear Josephine takes place in 2029
Over Brooklyn Hills takes place in 2035
Farm to Me takes place in 2047

Is climate a primary concern for the characters? Like most of us today, many of the characters aren’t thinking all that much about climate change. We know about climate change and see that this is a problem, but we mostly go about our quotidian lives focused on work, family, friends, and paying the next bill. But climate change is happening and affecting the whole world, just in different degrees of vulnerability and challenge. We don’t escape its effects entirely now, even in the relatively resource-rich part of the world in which we live.

Here in the developed world—the series’ through characters live in Berkshire County, Massachusetts—climate change remains more abstract: reports in the news, connection to political issues, and cautionary stories about extreme weather, such as droughts, deluges. storms and hurricanes, diseases, and heat. Climate change is a real problem that is catching up with us all, and actions that combat climate change early on—today!—helps reduce the devastating problems later. Within this infosphere that is today’s pervasive static, unsettling studies on the problems and hope-engendering developing solutions leak through. Of course, working toward progress creates ever-shifting forms of opposition from entrenched interests.

Each book carries one or more specific themes.

In Kill Well, that theme is the malfeasance of the fossil fuel industry that infiltrates every aspect of society, even seeping into quiet places and small towns. There’s a thriller subplot, welcome humor, and a wide range of characters, including a killer for hire. In 2026, most people are aware of climate change, but it remains abstract and far off seeming, and household economic concerns get the greater attention. But people, knowing or not, are already experiencing the fact that climate change is expensive and the re-ascension of Trump itself extracts a cost.

Dear Josephine looks at the carry-over consequences of extreme weather in the form of a massively destructive hurricane that hits Florida’s Gold Coast, devastating Miami. This book imagines the emotional effects of such an event even at remove, while also following a nefarious scheme by monied interests trying to shape an act coming up in post-2028 Congress in order gain control of the potentially staggering large budget, even while American society further frays under the carryover effects Trump, Big Oil, and the billionaires who have become the target for one or more people going around the country, murder list in hand.

Over Brooklyn Hills looks at climate migration, and for Berkshire County it is climate migration writ small as young people from New York City seek relief in the relatively cool hills of the Berkshires from a socked-in urban heatwave, even as on the international stage large-scale climate migrations develop. The main through-character Davin, at 70 years of age, has finally become an active supporter of climate change politics and the proud owner of solar panels and batteries and his membership in a VPP. And then there’s a domestic climate terrorist group in the news; No One is Safe, first introduced in Dear Josephine, now playing a far more dangerous game.

Farm to Me, an in-process manuscript of the 2047 story with a target publication date of Spring 2027, sees a world where rising average global temperatures are changing things consequentially, including food yields, with expanding Northeast farms taking on more agricultural production as Western farmers suffer chronic droughts. There’s a local murder mystery, too, in which the main through character Davin, now 82 and fixating on getting older, finds himself in the middle.

You can find the first three books—Kindle and paperback—of The Steep Climes Quartet through Amazon, or order it through your favorite bookstore or in ePub format.

The post Over Brooklyn Hills is Now Available first appeared on David Guenette.