Global Warming
In Global Warming: A Love Story, Antonio J. Hopson delivers a deftly braided tale-part ecological treatise, part romantic folly, and wholly absorbing. At its surface, it's a love story: a middle-aged science teacher and aspiring writer, Julian, returns to a professional development course and finds himself disarmed by Allison-a lithe, sharp-witted 20-year-old with a fianc and an eye for irony. Both are enrolled in a course exploring the geopolitical implications of climate change. Between lectures on carbon markets and glacial collapse, they pass notes, flirt, and gradually become entangled in a relationship that is, by turns, sweet, implausible, and deeply human.
Julian, the kind of hopeless romantic who quotes Sappho unironically and believes love is a kind of weather pattern, soon discovers that Allison is engaged to her high school sweetheart. What unfolds next is not so much seduction as an emotional climate event. With a mix of reckless charm and poetic bravado, Julian attempts to sway her-offering not roses but stanzas, not dates but monologues on social entropy and the moral calculus of desire.
The novel reaches its apex during a final exam, when Julian reads aloud a mock treaty on climate change that, between passages of academic prose, slips into verse-ancient, lyrical, Sapphic. It is a moment that blurs policy with passion, the scientific with the sublime. Allison, moved, must choose between comfort and combustion.
Around this core unfolds a lively orbit of supporting characters: a chain-smoking Kerouac devotee with a beer always at the ready, bikers who speak in fractured fairytales, schoolchildren parsing Alice in Wonderland as though it were scripture. The prose walks a delicate line between satire and sincerity, between heartbreak and high-minded debate.
Yes, there is sex. But also schematic diagrams of oceanic heat currents. Yes, there is courtship. But also rejection, philosophical inquiry, and the tragicomic recognition that even well-meaning men can be fools. The romance is the engine, but climate change is the atmosphere-unseen, unavoidable, and deeply entwined.
Hopson's narrative is a hybrid beast-tender and biting, romantic and ruthlessly self-aware. If you're the kind of reader who listens to All Things Considered on the way to a poetry reading, this is your book. If you've ever wondered whether the fate of the planet might hinge not on legislation but on longing-this is your book.
"He wrote the book Global Warming in first-person, which was incredibly challenging, as he learned the hard way " -Norelle Done, Seattle Wrote
Antonio J. Hopson is a poet, essayist, and writer of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in The Harrow, SNReview, Ascent Aspirations, Lost Magazine, The Piker Press, Akashic Books' Mondays Are Murder, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse. A Reader's Choice Award recipient from Farmhouse Magazine and a featured writer at Seattle's Hugo House, Hopson was also a national EPPIE Award finalist. He lives, writes, and teaches in the Pacific Northwest.
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