The day I sat down to write this review, there was an ominous story on the front page of the New York Times. Warnings that global warming will cause sea levels to rise “are no longer theoretical,” according to scientists; the ocean is already swallowing up portions of the U.S. coastline, from Maine to Florida. For anyone tempted to see climate change as a distant threat, such articles serve as a wakeup call. Or you could just read Meg Little Reilly’s debut novel, WE ARE UNPREPARED, an unflinching depiction of a worst-case climate change scenario.

Ash and Pia are a thirty-something couple who recently have fled Brooklyn for rural Vermont and a life of bee-keeping, gardening and pottery-making. They’re well-educated (him at Amherst, her at Middlebury), successful, in love and, Ash admits, “smug.” “We talked about self-reliance in those days as if it was a state of higher consciousness,” he muses. But trouble is brewing in their rural paradise.

"For the characters in WE ARE UNPREPARED, there’s no chance of going back to undo the damage done to the planet and prevent disaster. But for readers, the book is a vivid warning that if we want to save the things we love the most, the time to act is now."

A few short months after they settle into their new home, weather experts predict a storm of epic proportions, one that promises to upend life on the entire eastern seaboard. News of the coming apocalypse sends the already high-strung Pia into a flurry of activity, rushing out to buy seeds and stock the pantry shelves. Ash is initially more passive. He’s worried about The Storm, to be sure, but not enough to actually do much about it. Before long, their different responses to the coming threat reveal deep fractures within their marriage.

Pia --- who was previously fixated on the idea of having a baby --- abruptly switches into intense disaster readiness mode, falling in with a fringe group of preppers, whom her husband dismisses as “deranged weirdoes.” Meanwhile, Ash, who was initially lukewarm on the idea of fatherhood, begins to dream of becoming a foster parent to a neglected neighbor boy, an idea Pia doesn’t exactly warm to.

Reilly deftly charts the gradual disintegration of Ash and Pia’s marriage in her troubling novel, showing how, as one character says, the impending disaster is “the catalyst for a lot of this malcontent, but it’s not the cause.” But WE ARE UNPREPARED isn’t just the story of a marriage faltering during a crisis. Isole, the seemingly bucolic small town where Ash and Pia live, is also cracking under pressure. (The none-too-subtle name is a French word meaning “remote” or “isolated.”) What had previously been a village people by “old farm families, yuppie transplants, and rednecks,” who mostly got along, even if they didn’t always understand each other, quickly transforms into warring factions of “paranoid preppers, religious fanatics, and government tools.”

Unlike some recent apocalyptic narratives, like Edan Lepucki’s CALIFORNIA or Emily St. John Mandel’s STATION ELEVEN, which focus on how humanity copes (or doesn’t) after a life-altering disaster, Reilly flips the script, focusing on what happens before the society collapses. In WE ARE UNPREPARED, The Storm starts causing damage long before it actually arrives (and arrive it eventually does, in the novel’s dramatic third act). Climate change isn’t just going to swallow up our coastal cities and bury us in snow, Reilly says. It’s not just going to destroy our infrastructure and wreck the economy. If we’re not careful, it will tear apart our communities and our relationships, leaving us isolated and alone when we’re most in need of support from others.

Things aren’t all doom and gloom, though. It’s clear from the first pages that Ash survives The Storm (a narrative misstep that lessens the impact of some of the novel’s later scenes). Reilly, who previously worked with the Obama administration, still has some hope for humanity, even though she suggests it might take a catastrophe for us to pull our heads out of the sand when it comes to global warming. The destruction of the storm is “a predictable response to our collectively reckless behavior,” Ash notes in the prologue. For the characters in WE ARE UNPREPARED, there’s no chance of going back to undo the damage done to the planet and prevent disaster. But for readers, the book is a vivid warning that if we want to save the things we love the most, the time to act is now.