Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block
My rating: 4/5 cats
if you have been waiting for a dystopian retelling of the odyssey set in LA after an earthquake/tsunami combo ruins EVERYTHING and it is penelope who gets to do the odysseying this time, then guess what?? you only need to wait until august 27th!
it is a great adaptation, and even though it does call attention to its source material too frequently, pretty much literally stating several times “like in the odyssey!!!” i can overlook it because my guess is that most teens haven’t studied their homer with any real rigor—at that age, you are mostly just reading excerpts in school unless you are an industrious little independent reader.
i have only read weetzie bat from block before, but i intend to go back and read everything she has ever written. why wasn’t i reading her in high school? i would have been so much cooler. block is for the bad girls. the girls who aren’t all clumsy and lovelorn—the ones who fall for the other bad boys or girls, but who can take ’em or leave ’em—the tiny frail-looking things with whorish eye makeup and little sparkly-thin dresses who would cut you as soon as look at you and are on a much cooler plane than you will ever be. her stories are what every teen girl should be reading in order to grow up into formidable women.
this one doesn’t have a tough-girl protagonist, but a girl who says time and again how scared she is, how cowardly. and yet, faced with what she is faced with: the destruction of her city, her family swept away from her, the uncertainty of what will happen to her, and man-eating giants roaming the rubble, she girls up, shaves her head, and goes out to take back what matters to her, despite her fear. it is very inspirational.
pen has always felt like an outsider. in the time before the tsunami:
They were laughing and their hair was shining in the haze of Christmas lights, their limbs long as saplings. I thought, girls are magical, at this phase, girls are invincible, nothing can touch them. I didn’t think “us” because I didn’t feel that; I felt other, on the outside, watching them. I stayed at home with Ovid’s Metamorphosis. At least I was smart, I told myself. I read the encyclopedia for fun. Not everyone could do that Would want to do that, my friends would have said.
and along her journey in the after, she meets up with other misfit kids who felt “other” because of their gender or sexuality, and through their triumphs over the monsters they encounter they find friendship and love and acceptance and yadda yadda.
it sounds pat, but block has such facility with language and such a knack for creating characters that are at once recognizable and wholly original, it transcends whatever book-reporty regurgitation of plot i could come up with here. she is also one of the pioneers of the YA LGBTQ novel, writing weetzie bat when david levithan was probably still getting bullied in school. and she does it so well, so casually and matter-of-factly, you just gotta be awestruck with how cool she is. and was. and ever shall be.
oh, if you are looking for other cool odyssey riffs, allow me to suggest The Suitors, because NO ONE reads this book, and it makes me fume a little. i loved it. hhmph.
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