Mobility

by Lydia Kiesling

A propulsive novel about class, power, politics, and desire by the celebrated author of The Golden State.

The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age—from Azerbaijan to America—as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.

Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman—her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction’s power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Politics, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Environment

352 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2023

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mobility is Lydia Kiesling's second novel, following her debut The Golden State. I struggled with this. Mobility is centered on a young American woman named Bunny (yes), and follows Bunny from her teenage years as an American living abroad in Azerbaijan to her mid-30s. The novel highlights a host of political issues, with particular focus on climate change and the role of the fossil fuel industry. Although large sections of the book take place outside the US, virtually all of the named characters with dialogue are Americans or the occasional European. For a novel that purports to tackle issues of global importance, writing exclusively from a US-centric perspective is a rather disappointing move. The bulk of the book charts Bunny's political awakening, from doe-eyed teenager to a slightly less doe-eyed adult. Bunny is an extremely unlikable protagonist, which I take to be the point. In interviews, Kiesling has spoken intelligently about the role of fossil fuels and climate change, connecting policy choices to conceptual frameworks. Her book, though, is more rudimentary. The prose is so banal in places, and the core ideas reiterated with such redundancy, that I wonder if the book is aimed at a different market than I took it for. All that said, it's a novel that does take climate change seriously and dramatizes certain themes rather forcefully, such as male entitlement and patriarchal privilege in the workplace. Several friends have had more positive reactions to this book, so I know there are readers who see more merit in it than I did. Mobility is the debut offering from Crooked Media Reads, a new foray for the group behind the Pod Save America and related podcasts.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I must have missed something.

This was like 350 pages of an extremely basic, weight-obsessed, privileged white woman making awkward small talk at business functions and social events, doing her progressively more expensive and elaborate makeup and skincare, putting together cute little (and also progressively more expensive) outfits for work and parties and travel, all the while watching the Earth’s ecosystems fall apart and human rights disintegrate from her position climbing the middle management ranks of the oil industry - and to which her response is basically “huh.”

This is all recounted in what felt like excruciating detail, like a whales in Moby Dick level of detail.

It was like the most tedious parts of American Psycho but with a complacent, passively complicit millennial girlboss instead of an actual serial killer.

It got to the point where I was absolutely going to tear my hair out if I had to read one more word from or about (insert profanity) Bunny/Elizabeth. It felt as claustrophobic as being trapped at one of the countless inane business or social events described.

If this was meant to be a - very - extended metaphor for something like the role of the energy-gobbling, capitalist US in global destruction (??? I have no idea), this was an extremely weird, prolonged, and incredibly dull and annoying way to go about it.

You may be wondering why I awarded this a perfectly respectable three stars when clearly I kind of despised it?

Well, the author is an amazing writer; that is indisputable. It’s not her fault, but the concept just fell flat for me.

We are surrounded by people fiddling while watching Rome burn. We can all just look around us if we want to see that. I didn’t need a novelization of the horrific banality of it all.

However, despite the fact that I felt like I was being punked with this book or something, like is this shit for real? - everyone else seems to love it, so it must be me. I usually adore books in which not much happens, but for me this was next level watching paint dry.

(Okay, like watching paint dry that is also going to destroy the planet once it’s dried.)

Let it also be known that I loved the author’s first book and sobbed like a newborn ripped from the womb at the end of it.

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the strongest American novels I've read this year. The Franzen influence is inescapable here: multivalent one-word abstract noun as title, richly textured and anthropologically acute social realism, multi-generational upper-middle-class White family saga, environmentalist screeds in dialogue, full-frontal critiques of American capitalism and consumerism.

But this is far more than just homage or pastiche: Kiesling has fully inhabited the pretty vacant mind-space of her protagonist, using indirection to indict a single individual for her complicity in the collective disasters being unleashed by the fossil fuel industry's relentless carbonization of the atmosphere, and its complete capture of one of America's two political parties.

We move through the full sweep of the life of Elizabeth ("Bunny") Glenn, an elder millennial, Foreign Service brat, and daughter of a wealthy Texas WASP clan, from teenage-hood in Baku to her 30s in Houston to late middle age in Portland. Bunny is one of the shallowest, most self-absorbed, and least self-aware protagonists I've ever come across, with zero intellectual curiosity into how her stable bourgeois American life has been powered by rapacious oil extraction that's cooking the planet. Obsessed with hair, skincare, and clothes, and ambitiously working her way up the corporate ladder of the misogynistic good-old-boy energy industry, Bunny is the embodiment of a vaguely liberal White feminist who insists that she voted for Hillary, but whose desire for a comfortable amd unchallenging life blinds her from her own privilege and the consequences of her conspicuous consumption.

But that's all in the subtext and context-- Mobility is not a humorless diatribe, and Kiesling makes her points with wit, satire, subtlety, and indirection. And lest we end up feeling utterly superior to Bunny, Kiesling's real point here is that global warming is a hyperobject, something so vast, horrific, and endlessly ramifying that none of us can really wrap our heads around it, and so sweepingly systematic that individuals are powerless against it. Highly recommended.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected more out of this one, even though I did like the focus on Bunny (Elizabeth)'s career. It's a new-ish pet peeve of mine, though, when a book's concluding section fast forwards us into a slightly post-apocalyptic future (looking at you, Migrations).

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

[Gabrielle Korn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I inhaled this book. It takes the idea of the personal being political and applies it to climate change — how the individual choices that one woman makes over the course of her life are part of a larger system putting us all on a path to absolute environmental destruction. It's beautifully written, funny, sad, entertaining — it would honestly be just as good without the larger points about climate change (I love the main character and would read five more books about her) but achieves brilliance because of the political place it goes. Can't wait for it to come out and for everyone else to get their hands on it.

[CanadianReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kiesling’s novel has an unusual focus: a young woman at loose ends. Her temporary work placement at a Texas engineering firm fortuitously provides a route to employment in the oil/energy industry. The book is something of a coming-of-age story, but not quite as much as is advertised, mainly because the central character is incapable of genuine transformation. The raw material just isn’t there.

The reader first meets Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn in Baku, Azerbaijan in the summer of 1998 where her father has recently been stationed as a member of the US Foreign Service. The girl’s mother has returned to Texas to look after her ailing mother, taking the youngest child, “Small Ted”, with her. Fifteen-year-old Bunny remains in Baku with John, her older brother, and their dad.

At no point did I find Bunny likeable or sympathetic. However, the greater problem for me was that she isn’t interesting either. We’re led to believe that either puberty or too much time away from family—among her peer group at an elite New England private school—transformed the once bright, curious, and motivated child into a self-absorbed, boy-crazy adolescent. While her motivated brother joins a running club in Baku, Bunny wanders the streets, pores over fashion magazines, experiments with cosmetics, and surreptitiously smokes. Her mother had been understandably reluctant to leave her unsupervised.

Kiesling follows her protagonist from her teenaged years through to age 68 (the year 2051) when Bunny’s daughter Pamela is about to give birth. The novel provides the reader with a snapshot of the oil industry, its corrupt practices and dark partnership with the US government, the narratives (propaganda) it generates about itself, and the ways in which it has had to pivot and rebrand itself in response to the times. Feminism, climate change (particularly the apocalyptic flooding of recent years), geopolitics, and events of international significance (including Covid) are also explored.

Kiesling’s writing is generally strong and her reach is ambitious. I was interested enough to complete the book, but I did not love it. I’ve already mentioned the problem of Bunny—a dull, superficial, and essentially amoral character, who seems to be adrift for much of the novel. As I said, she didn’t engage me, and I think it was audacious of Kiesling to place this character and her banal existence at the centre of the book. But there are other problems, too. I understand the importance of setting the scene, bringing rather exotic Azerbaijan to life and impressing upon the reader just how much a place changes when major corporations discover its rich resources, but too much detail about Baku’s unusual architecture has been included here. I wish an editor had reined Kiesling in. While Mobility is a stimulating read, its 368-page page count would have benefited from being trimmed by at least a quarter.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for providing me with an advanced reader copy.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4-4.5 stars. Mobility is Lydia Kiesling's second novel and follows Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn throughout her life. We first meet her in 1998 at the age of 15. She is currently living in Baku, Azerbaijan, with her father who is a career U.S. diplomat and her older brother, John. Her mother has returned to Texas with the baby brother, Teddy Bear, to help care for her aging mother.

Bunny reads all the latest fashion magazines, like Cosmo, Vanity Fair and Vogue, for beauty advice and clues, because at this point in her life, she seems to believe a woman's worth is how attractive she is to a man. Baku is the current hot spot with its developing offshore oil business and has become a magnet for brash young men who want a piece of the action. Thankfully they seem to know Bunny is a bit TOO young to be toyed with.

Later, in her 20s, she is still looking for her niche in life. Her parents have divorced and she moves in with her distraught mother who has inherited her family's home in Beaumont, Texas. Bunny's brothers are off busy doing their own things. She decides to sign on with a temp employment agency who send her to work a clerical job at a private oil services company. There she slowly works her way up. The changes in her job seem to coincide with the changes in the energy industry. Quite a bit of the novel is an informative discussion of the structure of the oil industry--who owns what, how the industry is changing. Of course, climate change becomes a bigger factor as the years pass. But also who are employed in these well-paying jobs. Women engineers are few and far between and Bunny finds herself helping organize women to network.

I thought a lot about what the title means. Does mobility always mean improvement? You can be upwardly mobil because of receiving an education, through the job or profession you enter, through rising income, by the neighborhood you can afford to live in, and, in some cases, you might even move up in social class through the good fortune of these things. Consumerism rears its ugly head though and you might have to dress the part. Bunny remains obsessed with designer clothes, shoes and face creams throughout her life.

As part of a diplomat's family, Bunny has lived in several countries around the world, went to schools in America, and came back to Texas to live as an adult, so the mobility of her living circumstances is part of what shaped her life. Her extended family ends up scattered across the globe and don't see each other that often. Is that a downside to mobility?

Mobility is a part of modern life, as humans have the ability to travel across the globe and even into outer space. Gas and oil fuel that and many other of the commodities that make up our lives--electricity, heating, clothing, buildings, even food substances. Can alternatives to fossil fuels be found quickly enough to slow the problems caused by climate change? In the end, it may come down to what we truly need to live and what we can live without. Lots of fuel for thought here, pun intended.

I received an arc from the author and publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks! My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As she did in her debut novel, The Golden State, Kiesling shows a real talent for creating a complex, not especially admirable female protagonist and using her to highlight serious issues. Here, the focus is on complicity in creating the conditions that have led to our climate crisis.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a most unusual approach to a novel about the need to preserve the planet. It sneaks up on you, starting with a typical American teenager living in Baku, Azerbaijan, will her father. He works in Foreign Services and regularly comes into contact with people in the oil and gas industry. He is sent on various assignments around the world. Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn spends her time watching television in languages she does not understand and develops a crush on an older journalist. Her mother and brother have gone back to the States, so Bunny finds herself at loose ends. The storyline follows Bunny’s career in the energy industry.

She follows in her father’s footsteps, first becoming an assistant to an oil mogul, and working her way up the corporate ladder. It highlights the manner in which we justify getting involved in jobs or activities that harm the planet without taking stock of the bigger picture. It is a story of working in it, while being aware of its pitfalls, and how easy it is to just go with the flow rather than taking responsibility to act or change one’s life, with all the attendant work that change often requires.

If anyone is looking to understand the reach of oil and gas, its business, structure, and inner workings, this book provides an excellent guide. The author does this in an indirect manner, through the interactions of the characters without relying on long expository passages. It is structured into three parts using oil industry terminology: Upstream, Midstream, and Downstream. It is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and how we tend to smooth over uncomfortable thoughts and feelings – in this case, an impending climate disaster that we seem unable to stop.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

With her second novel, Lydia Kiesling has joined my pantheon of most-loved authors. I first encountered Lydia in 2009 on the excellent on-line publication The Millions. That was during the early days of book bloggers and she was writing wonderful reviews of older books, specifically those from The Modern Library. At the time I was reading older novels too (as I still am) and running my own blog, so I studied her reviews. She was clearly highly intelligent and not afraid of adding irreverence, quirky opinions, and a first-person voice to her reviews.

Lydia went on to become the Editor of The Millions in 2016. Then she published her own debut novel, California and had launched herself into the role of literary novelist. Mobility is another of her highwire leaps.

I was reading some of the reviews of Mobility here and it seems that some readers failed to understand that her novel is a satire. One could be excused for that because her main character, Bunny, seems so real, so engrossed in her own body image, her attire, her love life, and her road to financial security. I think Bunny is Lydia Kiesling’s stand-in for all of us as we grapple with the way the world is going. It is such a conundrum that all the “progress” and “advancements” we have made as supposedly the premiere species on earth has led us to the possible doom we face.

Can we give up oil? Will money save us? At least, some of us?

[Brianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m a little bummed I used an audible credit for this book.

Bunny/Elizabeth is an elder millennial that I found only somewhat relatable. The most authentic parts of the book were in the descriptions of place and the emotions around a nomadic childhood, which draws directly upon the writer’s own experience (hence, write what you know). Besides the fact that the nickname Bunny, while harking back to another work of fiction, comes across as sounding like a stripper name instead of something a young lady would actually go by, there were aspects of her character that seemed like they added little to making her “real.” For example, I don’t think I know any millennials that smoke as much as Bunny.

Also, Bunny is so completely lacking in a core set of characteristics, it’s hard to describe her as anything other than insecure and superficial. The way she “controls” her weight throughout the snippets of her life is some seriously disordered eating, she’s always feeling like she’s not contributing or doesn’t understand the industry and it’s nuances, and having little convictions or character arc herself, the minor characters in the book are left to monologue/lecture at Bunny while she defends her work as necessary because she needs a paycheck.

Spare me the apocalyptic endings, too. It was perhaps imaginable, but also didn’t add to or sum up the plot in a meaningful or necessary way. Like another reviewer said…..what happened? Was there a climax? Was there a point beyond vaguely explaining the evils of the oil and gas industry? If there was, I missed it.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is clearly making a point about climate change and that politics and the oil industry created the conditions that allowed it to happen even though the problem was identified and understood decades ago. She does this by choosing a main character, a young woman who is part of the duplicitous machine through her job as an apologist for the oil industry, and making it clear that she’s pretty much a stooge—like every one of us —or something like that. We’ve all been busy fiddling while Rome burned, and now all we can do is watch it all unfold in the ways we’ve been well informed it will, and in the not too distant future at that. Bunny is 15 when the novel opens in 1998, living in Azerbaijan, her American diplomat father’s latest posting, as various geopolitical forces jockey for access to its vast oil reserves in the freshly post-Soviet era. The author astutely introduces characters, such as journalists, who are able to introduce and explain elements of the themes quite organically, not didactically. The years pass, and Bunny finds herself back in Texas post-college, struggling in low-paid temp and part-time jobs, until she lands a full-time job in the oil patch. The reason I give this smart book only three stars is that Bunny’s ordinary life is shown in detail for several hundred pages, and we only get to the knockout punch in the final dozen or so pages. As I said, I suspect the author’s point is that this is how we’re all living our lives: fully aware of what’s coming but choosing to look away.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this smart, worldly novel that examines the impacts that oil has had on geopolitics, world wars, climate, and in the lives of all of us over the last several decades, and into the future.

Written by Lydia Kiesling, who also wrote the equally compelling The Golden State a few years back, this book follows main character Bunny as she grows up the only daughter of a Foreign Service family. Bunny is a great character in her own right, and her journey from a teenager who is intelligent but somewhat unsure of herself (who isn't as a teen though!) to a woman who makes all the big life choices and lives with the consequences is a really innovative and effective way to force the reader to consider all the ways we participate in various facets of the oil industry, as well as the compromises we learn to live with in order to sleep at night.

[Mikki Janower · Rating 4 out of 5]

scathing, unforgiving, sharp, and so relevant. an unusually hi-def rendition of the present and a much-needed punch in the gut

[Casey Noller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my #1 book that I wanted to read this August... so maybe my expectations were a little high.

I kept waiting for a climax. Any climax. I think I know what it was: The narrator, Bunny/Elizabeth, having a brief affair with Charlie.

But other than that, it didn't seem like anything really happened in Mobility. We watch Bunny/Elizabeth grow up, move into the oil industry, and pretty much stay there until a slightly apocalyptic wrap-up chapter in the end. Did her views on things change? I don't know, because I felt really disconnected from the main character. Maybe it was the third-person POV, maybe it was that we only saw her life in short vignettes. It felt like this with the other characters too—like we were supposed to connect more with Maryellen, with Charlie. But there wasn't much depth to explore.

Part of this problem also likely came from the way the discussion was led in terms of geopolitical oil history and movement. It wasn't subtly woven into the story, which I believe is what the author intended to do. Instead, it was braggadocious characters like Charlie or academic characters like Ted Senior talking at Bunny/Elizabeth in long monologues.

I read the full book because I expected something to happen, specifically a moral crisis from Bunny/Elizabeth. If that happened... I must've missed it.

Read more of my book, movie, television, and podcast reviews at Content Consumed!

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one hits close to home, plot-wise. I am from Texas born and raised, with a 13-year stint in Louisiana. Bunny is the age of my children. We can’t look away, no matter how hard we try.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, often compelling novel, even if Bunny Glenn, the protagonist, whose life we are in from age 15 through late thirties, is not always up to the task assigned her, our guide into the "hyperobject" of the oil industry, meaning a phenomenon so large it is impossible to fully understand and get our arms around what it is, does, how it makes, in this case, the world run in all different kinds of nefarious ways. Bunny is our stand-in as well, wanting to make something of ourselves, wanting to be good or seem good, to do good, or at least try, and yet without sufficient knowledge, or maybe even with sufficient knowledge, it seems mostly impossible. A woman driving a Prius and working in the oil industry, even if Bunny is helping an old family-run oil business move to renewables. A satire to a degree, also a coming of age story of hapless Bunny who is not smart enough, who comes to drive and ambition later in her life, who does not really know herself, and we see her in her misery of teenage-hood, the daughter of a diplomat moving among countries rich in oil under the sea, inside the earth. It is a political book in the way it holds up a mirror, we are all complicit in what has happened and continues to happen to the world. It is also fun to read.

Thanks to Zando and Netgalley for the ARC.

[lindsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this. It so perfectly encapsulates the banality of evil — the alienated technocrats placated into apathy with consumerism and the false consciousness of corporatized identity politics. It reminded me of American Psycho in a lot of ways, exploring the other side of the coin — not institutionalized violence made deeply personal, but institutional violence completely depersonalized.

[Emily St. James]

I don't want to call this an anti-novel because it's not that audacious, but I'm fascinated by how completely divorced the plot and main character arc are. The plot, such as it is, is about a world heating itself up into oblivion, but the main character arc is sort of similar to something like The Worst Person in the World, about a young woman who keeps tumbling end over end into new things without really considering what she wants beyond survival. Kiesling seems to both find said protagonist loathsome and love her dearly for all her faults, which is a great tack to take on a novel that offers a global sweep while being confined to one woman's point-of-view. The concluding chapter hits like a ton of bricks. Oddly, very much in conversation with North Woods in that regard.

Also, Bunny, this book's protagonist, is maybe a year younger than me, and her daughter was born the same time mine was. Didn't have feelings about that at all!

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mobility begins in the late 90s with teenage Elizabeth, whom everybody calls Bunny. Her father is a diplomat in Azerbaijan and Bunny in many ways reflects the life of a teenager in the 90s, with a little more oil and politics thrown in. Being similar in age to Bunny, I related to her quickly. The book carries us through Bunny’w life until middle age. We see her try and figure out her way and then make a career in the oil business and a life for herself. Her past often pops up in her present, presenting different conflicts throughout. In many ways Climate Change and environmental issues are secondary characters, always present and impacting the narrative but often dismissed. The book was very interesting.
I received an ARC from NetGalley.

[ocelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

adore a novel that gently invites you to open up a few wiki pages on oil production in the former soviet union <3 i saw lydia kiesling talk about this and she joked that in its early stages a friend referred to it as her "sexy oil vignettes" but having finished it I think that is probably still the best description. its beauty resides entirely within these sharp, crystal clear moments and its structure is this hazy shimmering mirage-like portrait that materializes out of their juxtaposition. a life is something of a hyperobject itself?

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

gina haspel jump scare! I feel like lydia kiesling was doing the authorial equivalent of struggling to keep a straight face when she slipped that in there. this book starts out as something close, a few keenly observed weeks, and gradually stretches out into a great festering wound. so many sharp moments in which a seemingly throwaway detail gives you a glimpse through the scene and into the larger world. I think there were a few extraneous chapters, years in bunny's life that don't show the reader anything new, but overall an extremely effective novel.

[Jordana Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

i sped through this book - i enjoyed its perspective of the oil industry through the eyes of a foreign service daughter spending time in azerbaijan as a teen to working in oil herself, who is the classic liberal but mostly apolitical white woman who winds up in oil bc she wants $ and is in texas… i found a lot of the oil and gas facts and insights confusing bc the author djdnt provide a lot of context — was it intentional so we felt as ignorant as the main character? am i just ignorant of so much of what happened with the oil and gas industry in the past 20 years? regardless, i enjoyed the book and was grateful to learn from the wikipedia articles i inevitably googled while reading.

i ultimately didn’t like as much as i expected from the start — as the years passed for the character, i found my interest was less piqued

[kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

MOBILITY unfortunately didn’t move me!

bunny is the teen daughter of a diplomat in late 1990s post-soviet azerbaijan, whose eyes are slowly opening to the social & power structures of her oil city, baku. kiesling then chronicles her unsteady entre into adulthood: mid 20s bunny, adrift in the coastal texas oil & gas country with her lonely mom and an economic recession, saved by a 2010s temp job that morphs into an energy comms career under the tutelage of an oil family. we watch as early 30s bunny descends into girlboss-dom, headed toward a required marriage, fully entrenched in the houston oil lifestyle of material comforts but never staunchly politically committed to the industry that pays her bills.

in fact, she's not committed to anything. aggrieved at others’ judgment, and vaguely wary of looming climate crisis, bunny simply floats on, aloof, moving through the world with the privilege of unending detachment. she's emotionally hollow, making it nearly impossible to feel anything for or about her. MOBILITY reads cold, kiesling never able to balance the cerebral politics of energy with the emotionality required of character study.

bunny at 15, ignorant but striving to grasp the secrets of oil and womanhood as the millennium dawns, was the best section of this book. but overall it disappointed; kiesling's ability to line up excellent thematic elements shattered by an inability to execute on them. a late return to baku could've been pivotal for bunny's growth but instead turns inane. MOBILITY as character study falters in its emotional disconnect, and bunny’s choices as political/social commentary were lost amongst info dumps on energy geopolitics that never amounted to anything. the final chapter was sloppy and atonal, torn from the pages of a lesser book and would've been better cut entirely.

kiesling brings so much to the surface just to let it all sink. MOBILITY is not the deft exploration and/or critique of capitalism, personal complicity, corporate feminism, the energy industry or climate change it could've been and in the end was simply muted and indistinct, as meandering, vacant, and equivocal as bunny.

[Bryn Lerud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I found fascinating even if it didn’t amaze and enthrall me as a 5 star book would. It’s about a young woman, Bunny, who is the daughter of a diplomat and so spends part of her childhood living in Baku, Azerbaijan. She learns about the oil business from journalists and then moves on to work for an oil company in Texas. The book has a definite lesson to teach; it’s published by Crooked Media Reads, a left wing think tank. The book lectures us on how we are killing our planet but doesn’t offer any plan. I think it’s interesting that Bunny is both a stand in for all of us comprising our values while working in corporate America and she follows her own very idiosyncratic path. She believes in slowing down climate change by using alternative sources of energy but in the end she has enough money to buy a bunker in which to live while the rest of the country floods and endures killing heat.

[Claire Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
You learn a surprising amount about oil production here.
The main character, who we first meet at 15, is somewhat inexplicable (motives and such), but I really liked her by her 30s! And I am not sure what we are to do with the view of the future. But I did like this a lot. Just can’t tell you why.

[E.Y. Zhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

amazing, exhilarating, depressing

[Pat Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, this novel seems to be a coming-of-age story, centering on 15-year-old Bunny who is spending the summer in Baku, Azerbaijan, with her diplomat father and her older brother who has been ignoring her since a falling-out at the end of the school year. Her mother and younger brother have gone to Texas to help her grandmother, and Bunny is bored with too much time on her hands. She is obsessed with her looks, lacks friends her age, especially boys, doesn’t speak the language, and since it is 1998, there is no social media or internet to keep her connected with friends from school. While reading the first part of the novel, I found myself getting bored with Bunny!

Fortunately, I became more interested in Bunny’s life as she grows up, graduates from college, and starts to work at a small, family owned oil company in Texas, first as a clerical assistant, and then quickly moving up to becoming the assistant to one of the owners who sees Bunny’s potential. At first, she finds her work boring, but realizes it is mostly due to her lack of knowledge about the energy business. She starts to take courses, travels to conferences, and begins to understand the complexities of the oil and gas business. She changes her name to Elizabeth and seeks out other women in the industry for mentorship. She still is obsessed with her looks, however, and wants to find a man to fall in love with, who will recognize her talents.

There are so many layers to this book. I did not touch on the global and political complexities of the oil industry that Kiesling raises, but as Elizabeth becomes educated, I did too. The second half of the book is quite compelling with the political changes in the US, the controversies of drilling for oil and gas, and the rise of alternatives energy sources. You will need to have a dictionary handy as you read this novel. Highly recommended.

[Ruby Belle]

I liked this book but for complicated reasons that wouldn’t make me jump to recommend it to anyone. It’s a kinda classic unlikeable young woman protagonist who maybe feels more like you than you are comfortable with who is reckoning with the terrors of living in the world but what I thought was interesting about it was that it was centered around the oil industry and her proximity to it in her childhood and adulthood. My ideal book is fiction where I can learn a tidbit or two and this was that! I was also obsessed with the way the author had all of her longest pieces of history/context of the oil industry happen as drunken rants at parties where the main character is flirting with or otherwise socially navigating the explainer. Add some flirting or tension to an otherwise boring and technical topic??? Ideal learning environment for me. So I loved that and appreciated learning more about the oil industry in the us and abroad. The protagonist’s dad was in the foreign service so she grew up abroad (we mostly hear about time in Baku and Athens) which was an interesting element as well. That being said I feel like there were some pieces of it I could do without - like her entirely irrelevant obsession with her body.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This settles you into Bunny's complacency to land its devastating gut punch in the end - more devastating because it feels scary real