What do you think?
Rate this book
Bloom Again: A Novel
Elyse is an empty-nest mother and artist in Alaska, and Astrid is a paleobotany professor in North Carolina. When the seemingly fulfilling lives of these distanced childhood friends are shaken, everything they’ve carefully established—from friends to careers to marriages—shifts, slips, unravels. This outer unraveling mirrors a growing discomfort with their safe lives. For Elyse, it begins with a mundane moment at the grocery store and a news story about polar bears. For Astrid, it happens during a faculty reception where a visiting lecturer’s talk sparks a rift with her mentor and father figure.
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crisis in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
As the ground beneath them stirs, both women begin to recall their shared childhoods. Each must ignore the rumblings and fight for their comfortable existence—or leap. Before long, Elyse is following a Yup’ik marine mammal hunter along the windswept Siberian coast, and Astrid is risking her entire career to plant trees in India. As they navigate upheaval, they also confront the reminders of their past—a past whose full truth carries in it the promise of their future.
Bloom Again weaves together sophisticated narrative and characters, evocative travel and nature writing, and effective and reliable depictions of the climate change crisis in parts of the world underrepresented in mainstream literary fiction. A realistic work of ecoclimate fiction, it considers how people confront and respond to an amorphous yet unavoidable event like climate change in their everyday lives, as well as how women find new inspiration in their “second spring”—a time in life when career and family needs are fulfilled. It’s a book about waking up and finding our way, together.
284 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2025
1 person is currently reading
19 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 18, 2025
Compelling characters, relevant themes, beautiful prose, art, science, the Arctic, India, Anchorage… this book has it all!
October 19, 2025
Bloom Again by Marybeth Holleman is a quietly powerful climate novel that intertwines personal loss, environmental change and questions of scientific and emotional responsibility. Published as part of the Alaska Literary Series, the novel is structured into four sections with six chapters each, and follows two women — Elyse and Astrid — whose separate lives slowly and inexorably become entangled (again).
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Arctic, the novel is anchored by vivid scenes that reveal the scale and intimacy of ecological crisis. Early on, Elyse learns of four drowned polar bears, a devastating image that establishes the book’s central concern: a disappearing world. Holleman seamlessly moves between the planetary and the personal, capturing how environmental grief reverberates through families and communities. Elyse’s son questions the value of education in a dying world, while Astrid, a paleobotanist, reflects on how past climatic shifts differ radically from today’s human-driven acceleration.
Holleman’s prose is particularly strong when it attends to landscape and language. Descriptions of the north and its people — with their “harsh accent” born from “the crunch of ice against shore” — are both precise and poetic. Astrid’s journey with scientists and artists to Cape Vankarem evokes the entanglement of art, science and activism, while encounters with communities from Kaktovik highlight the complex, often ambivalent relationships between Indigenous communities and resource development. The novel doesn’t romanticise these tensions but instead presents them as lived realities.
One of the book’s thematic throughlines is the question of what it means to act — or fail to act — in the face of ecological loss. Astrid wrestles with the compromised ethics of scientific funding, and Elyse wonders what she can possibly do for polar bears moving farther north. Love and grief, the novel suggests, are always intertwined. “There’s no more north for them to move to,” one character observes, summing up the strong, inescapable bind of climate crisis.
Thank you to the author and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC of the novel!
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Arctic, the novel is anchored by vivid scenes that reveal the scale and intimacy of ecological crisis. Early on, Elyse learns of four drowned polar bears, a devastating image that establishes the book’s central concern: a disappearing world. Holleman seamlessly moves between the planetary and the personal, capturing how environmental grief reverberates through families and communities. Elyse’s son questions the value of education in a dying world, while Astrid, a paleobotanist, reflects on how past climatic shifts differ radically from today’s human-driven acceleration.
Holleman’s prose is particularly strong when it attends to landscape and language. Descriptions of the north and its people — with their “harsh accent” born from “the crunch of ice against shore” — are both precise and poetic. Astrid’s journey with scientists and artists to Cape Vankarem evokes the entanglement of art, science and activism, while encounters with communities from Kaktovik highlight the complex, often ambivalent relationships between Indigenous communities and resource development. The novel doesn’t romanticise these tensions but instead presents them as lived realities.
One of the book’s thematic throughlines is the question of what it means to act — or fail to act — in the face of ecological loss. Astrid wrestles with the compromised ethics of scientific funding, and Elyse wonders what she can possibly do for polar bears moving farther north. Love and grief, the novel suggests, are always intertwined. “There’s no more north for them to move to,” one character observes, summing up the strong, inescapable bind of climate crisis.
Thank you to the author and the publisher for providing me with a digital ARC of the novel!
Read
October 4, 2025"Bloom Again" is a lovely, fresh dive into our collective and individual struggle to navigate the climate crisis and turmoil in our own lives, a beautiful evocative blend of art and science. The two main characters, a botanist and an artist, are instantly familiar and relatable, and come to epitomize our interconnectedness with each other, and importantly, with our non-human companions on Earth. This is not just a good read, it is a must read! Thank you Marybeth Holleman.
August 12, 2025
This is a thought-provoking novel that shows the benefits of detailed research. Two contrasting female protagonists respond to climate change and biodiversity loss in different ways, each navigating their relationships with partners, peers and mentors as they seek an authentic and meaningful response to the changing world. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and really appreciated the respectful, detailed and moving portrayal of Indigenous activists and their experiences.
January 28, 2026
Another book for 2026 that I really, really wanted to love. I love the premise, I love the idea of weaving ecology and climate science into the story. It just never really gathered steam. This book is not quick-paced, nor are the characters compelling enough to endure the slow slog. There are beautiful nature descriptions and spot-on science, but the observations don't seem to dance comfortably with the fiction genre.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews