Even If Everything Ends by Jens Liljestrand is not your (increasingly) normal scream-in-your-face climate change disaster novel, which will please many readers at the same time it will likely bother others. Rather than focusing on the science, or even on the big events that are becoming ever more common, it uses one of those big events to zero in on the human element, from several perspectives.

Until the world is actually unable to support human life, we will continue to deal with our mundane day-to-day lives even while concurrently dealing with whatever changes we have to make, voluntary or forced, due to climate change. It is this intersection where this novel takes place. Using one family that is separated during a crisis, along with a couple of peripheral (to the family, essential to the novel) characters, we see how the trials and tribulations can affect people simply wanting to live their lives.

What makes this novel special is the way these characters are presented. It isn't about liking or disliking them, that is beside the point, unless the reader is only capable of caring about people they like and dismiss the rest of the human race. The character I would most dislike in real life (I'm not sharing which one) is still presented in a way that allows me to care about what happens. Make no mistake, all of these characters have their flaws and some of those flaws can be annoying. Gee, sounds like real life to me.

This is not, as I've seen some claim, a disjointed novel. Yes, there are several threads that split then come back together. Each thread is given time and space to develop independently of the larger familial story but are also each essential to how those threads will come back together. Granted, this isn't an elementary step-by-step story that holds your hand and walks you from scene to scene in a straight line. But, from my experience, life isn't like that either but hopefully you don't consider your life disjointed just because things happen in more than one place concurrently. For readers who have trouble following life, I mean, a novel that presents more than a single perspective and more than a single thread, you might want to skip this. For most readers, this will be a wonderfully broad read that will allow you to see things from multiple viewpoints.

Highly recommended to readers who want to read more climate change fiction but from a more personal level than a societal level. Like every novel written, there is a "bias," it is written by a human being and touches on a topic that is of major importance. If you want to stick your head in the sand, by all means do so, but don't hide your blindness to the topic by hiding behind the vacuous claim the novel is biased. Grow up.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Goodreads. ( )