This fairy-tale register is just one of many modes of storytelling that seep into The Morningside. The book’s grimly familiar vision of the environmentally devastated near future places it alongside recent 'cli-fi' by Claire Vaye Watkins and Lydia Millet ... The narrative has the mysterious, intoxicating pull of classic children’s books...Sil’s story is an adventure that is at times so captivating that we can briefly forget that it’s an elegy ... Obreht doesn’t say exactly what those debts are—instead, she lets the diminished world of the novel, like the future our younger generations will face, speak for itself. It seems darkly appropriate that she wrote this novel while pregnant during the pandemic ... where flights of invention made The Tiger’s Wife tilt toward allegory, the textures of The Morningside—a familiar city, a familiar crisis, a familiar complacency—make this future feel closer, shot through with an almost excruciating intimacy. Here, storytelling is not a way of relating to a mythical past but of growing up in the long middest, when the idea of home and the promise of safety are harder and harder to hold on to every day.
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