The Displacements, by Bruce Holsinger, was published by Riverhead Books in 2022, so I’m not beating myself up for only recently finding it, and I’ll admit to liking the book one heck of a lot.
There are quite a few non-fiction works on climate migration/displacement, including The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, by Jake Bittle, published February 21, 2023 (and reviewed by me here; On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America, by Abrahm Lustgarten, published March 26, 2024; and Nomad Century by Gaia Vince, published on August 22, 2023. There are plenty of other such books, too, and that’s hardly surprising since climate change projections have far too many places on our good Earth where evolving climate conditions are expected to make uninhabitable, at least on any sensible and practical basis.
There are plenty of novels—climate fiction—that have climate displacement as significant focus and which have been reviewed by me. Nick Fuller Goggin’s novel, The Great Transition, has the older generations responsible for not doing enough to change the course of climate change sent off to re-education camps. The Forcing , by Paul E. Hardisty, holds a similar retributive population relocation. The Deluge, by Stephen Markley, like many other books, has people on the move because of improbably high and fast developing sea rise; The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton, is an example of sea rise displacement on a gradual basis.
The Displacements has carved out its place among climate migration stories by focusing on specific characters displaced by an event. In this book, the event is a Category 6 hurricane that destroys Miami and surrounding areas, necessitating Federal “Internal Displaced Persons” camps for hundreds of thousands of storm-wrecked people without sufficient means to find private solutions. The family at the center of the book is well-off, at least by all appearances, with the husband and father of a blended family an important surgeon, and the mother a recently successful artist (the book more or less starts with a sold-out show of her work at a gallery), then cue the kids, the storm, and the loss of cell phone and wallet, and they end up at an IDP FEMA camp in Oklahoma, lives turned upside down.
The plot points are, as plot points often are, contrived, and the loss of precious credit cards and the absence of password memories by way of password manager in the mother’s lost phone means, along with the lost cash, the nice cushy upper-middle-class life is out of reach. Oh yeah, also, it looks like the father has died a hero’s death trying to evacuate his hospital’s ICU. Still, having an upper-middle-class family fall so quickly and irreversibly helps strike the theme home, which is that the concept of home is a fragile one, and ever more so with the threats from climate change. The main value of the novel is this focus on a family thrown into Federal care that is understandably stretched thin considering the scope of the disaster. At various points in the story, you’ll likely find yourself rolling your eyes or wanting to dope slap one or another member of the displaced family and the angle of the college-aged son from the previous marriage becoming a drug dealer in the camp is thin and often exasperating, even while character development and plot rely so heavily upon it.
I had another reason for my interest in the book. In my novel Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet—which was supposed to be published in 2024—a central story element is a hurricane that destroys Miami and surrounding areas. The similarities between the two storms are astounding, and it is clear that both Holisinger and I have taken great care to keep exaggeration at arm’s length by strict study of past hurricanes and science’s consensus projected expectations of what likely is coming our way. We both selected the same target for the big storms, although that is hardly surprising, given the absurdly vulnerable situation of Miami and the Gold Coast. Frankly, it is a miracle that huge destruction of that area has yet occurred.
From that common point the two books greatly diverge, with Dear Josephine having the hurricane in the background and experienced as would those not co-located with the storm, which is through the news and as conversations among friends and neighbors. Sure, the storm is big news and the follow up efforts post-disaster are big news too, but some of the characters living in Berkshire County, Massachusetts suffer more from the storm of news and are complaining about it quickly enough, exactly as should be expected for any and all of us not caught directly in the consequences of climate change, whether hurricanes or wildfires or floods or heatwaves. Go ahead, tell me that this wouldn’t be so.
Talking about disasters—see, it all comes down to our particular experiences—the publication date for Dear Josephine has been pushed and pushed and pushed. You can read the latest confessions and confusions at cause, in a recent post, “Oh Dear! Dear Josephine is Late Again! This Time, Blame the November 2024 Elections.”
As for The Displacements, the book is a solid read, with caveats about some plot points. The book, for any curious climate fiction reader, definitely has a place on the shelf.