Private Rites

Three sisters who don't particularly get along in a future metropolis--feeling like there was a London-ish vibe?--where everyone has to keep moving to higher floors of skyscrapers to escape the constantly rising water due to neverending rain. I love me some mournful apocalypse, and what I appreciated about this one was the inexorability of the rain combined with the way people know they're doomed, yet somehow they just keep finding through another day. There's a constant sense that, even as they know the rain will never stop, they keep thinking maybe it will...

I rather cluelessly did not register the King Lear quote that begins the book; it's not the famous and expected one ("blow wind! crack your cheeks" etc) but I ended up rereading the book through that lens once a reviewer pointed it out. It's beautifully written and I liked taking extra time with it for that reason, because as a reviewer here has noted, the pacing is excellent and I really wanted to know how things ended up, so didn't quite soak it up. First book I can remember with a they/them major character (other than the theyby in Miranda July's All Fours), which was an interesting experience reading wise; probably because of my generation, I found myself, despite myself, continually trying to gender the character, another reason I wanted to read it again. All in all, while I didn't love it, i find myself thinking about the world created and the characters often, so it gets the fourth star for that.

One quibble I had was that there was still at the least chicory if not actual coffee for one of the characters to work as a barista. I kept wondering, where are they getting the milk? What happens to food supply in a world where the rain never stops? So that interrupted my reading a bit.

As an aside, I had recently watched Bad Sisters and couldn't help casting the three sisters similar to the show, although the show has five so I found myself flipping around a bit, which was actually kind of fun.