By Marybeth Holleman. University of Alaska Press, 2025.
Bloom Again is a novel that unfolds the story of two women whose seemingly fulfilling lives are shaken by environmental catastrophe, leading them to changes that reverberate into a shared, but forgotten, past.
Weaving together sophisticated literary narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of climate change crises in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction, Bloom Again is a realistic work of eco/climate fiction (cli-fi) about Elyse, an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid, a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. For Elyse, it’s a mundane moment at the grocery store; for Astrid, it’s just another faculty reception—but with that first shudder beneath their feet, everything they’d carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. These outer unravelings mirror a growing discomfort with those safe lives.
Both must either ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable lives—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yupik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is planting trees in Goa, India, risking her entire career. As they navigate upheavals, each also confronts reminders of their shared past—one whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
This story weaves two guiding threads: How do people, in their everyday lives, confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change? And, how do women, at the point in their lives called the “second spring” when career and family needs are fulfilled, find new inspiration?
A fresh addition to the vibrant subgenre of long fiction based in natural science and studied real-world adaptations, Bloom Again illuminates the undercurrent of climate change in ordinary people’s everyday lives, the essential value of wild places and wild lives in the human psyche, and a path to transforming humanity’s collective paralysis and ennui into creative, passionate, and joyful action. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
Marybeth Holleman’s newest book is the novel Bloom Again. She’s also author of the poetry collection tender gravity and the memoir The Heart of the Sound, among others. She co-authored Among Wolves with Gordon Haber about his work and co-edited Crosscurrents North, an anthology of Alaska prose and poetry. She’s also co-editor of the forthcoming A Poetic and Artistic Field Guide to Alaska. Her award-winning work has been published in over 50 venues including Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, and The Guardian. Raised by North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains, she now lives in the embrace of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. marybethholleman.com
