Mobility

Kiesling’s (The Golden State) novel commences when teenager Bunny Glenn is stationed with her family in Azerbaijan in the late 1990s, after the Soviet Union has collapsed. Bunny’s father, a career diplomat, is in Azerbaijan to represent U.S. interests amid dozens of other international players seeking to benefit from the enormous oil reserves beneath the Caspian Sea. Later, as a young adult, Bunny and her mother return to Texas and Bunny lands a job in the petroleum industry. As Bunny pursues her career, she increases her knowledge about the petroleum industry and becomes aware how it shapes the geopolitical landscape while contributing to climate change and the planet’s environmental degradation, which begins to truly set in during Bunny’s middle age. Though this is a coming-of-age novel, Bunny never actually experiences significant psychological or moral growth typical of the genre, in an atypical journey that’s actually the novel’s strength; Kiesling exposes Bunny’s complicity in the coming environmental destruction.