“Once we lived in a summer country. In the woods there were treehouses, and on the lake there were boats.”

The grown Evie, as the novel’s narrator, begins her recollection of a pivotal time of her youth with the wistful tone of a fairytale, suggesting that her story is set in a world that has been lost forever to the realm of nostalgia. She offers no description of the present, but her wistful scene-setting combines with her later references to the “done deal” of climatic degradation in order to drive home the point that her current reality is no longer a carefree world of treehouses, boat excursions, or lazy summers.

“The great house had been built by robber barons in the nineteenth century, a palatial retreat for the green months. Our parents, those so-called figures of authority, roamed its rooms in vague circuits beneath the broad beams, their objectives murky. And of no general interest.”

The vacation house rented by “the parents” for their college reunion is a Gilded Age mansion built over a century ago by New York tycoons as a summer retreat from the heat of the city. The renters are middle-class professionals whom Evie accuses of retreating from their obligations to the environment and to the future; they use the vacation house as a way to shelter from the consequences of rising global heat, and their escape is aided by liberal doses of drugs and alcohol. The “vague circles” of their listless wanderings in the house mirror that of their narcissistic, ineffectual lives, which have done little or nothing to make the world a more sustainable place.