The town of Rudder, Florida, symbolizes a world impacted by climate change. The author bolsters the idea of Rudder as its own little world by mentioning other places, such as California and Wyoming, but keeping the story rooted in Rudder and its immediate surroundings. By charting the deterioration of a single town, Brooks-Dalton offers a grim warning. The danger of severe weather rapidly intensifies in just a few generations: “Kirby is old enough to remember arguments about whether climate change was real. Lucas is old enough to remember when tourists still came. But to Wanda, these things are only stories, so distant they might as well be fiction” (115). The near-future setting rebukes climate-change deniers and raises the ominous question of what sort of world younger generations will inherit. Brooks-Dalton’s narration further exposes the futility of denial in Chapter 32 when Lucas reconnects with Gillian, an affluent young woman who has moved away from Rudder:

The safe zones have shrunk, will go on shrinking, but the people still firmly attached to the idea that there will continue to be such lines—between safe and not safe, between us and those poor people—are determined to go on as they always have (132).