2016 read #10: Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block.

Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block
231 pages
Published 2013
Read from January 28 to February 1
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I'm so frustrated with this book. It could have been -- by all rights it should have been -- so much better. In fact it could have been any number of excellent books. First, there's the book conjured by the magic of the title, perhaps some kind of realistic and depressing yet indomitably hopeful tale of rising seas, lowering water tables, and resource struggles, all mixed expertly with queer YA romance, which would have been awesome, but which fails to materialize. Next there's the book suggested by the summary: A queer YA retelling of The Odyssey, set in post-apocalyptic SoCal. I'd read that book in a heartbeat -- but the summary evokes a far better book than what we get. Then there are the rare nuggets of quality storytelling, mostly flashbacks sketching in the comings-of-age for each member of our band of protagonists. Some kind of literary YA exploring gender and sexuality and queer relationships in an intelligent, informed, and sensitive manner would be a tremendous novel, would it not? Alas, those few nuggets are all we get here.

Love in the Time of Global Warming defies its own high-concept premise and my own innate goodwill toward inclusivity and representation in fiction to be a muddled, awkwardly written mishmash of half a dozen different concepts, all of them undercooked and crammed together without finesse. The first sign of trouble is the in media res prologue, an all-italics flash forward taken word-for-word from the final showdown. The Odyssey thing never gels, functioning as more or less a gimmick to get us to the halfway mark before petering out; the idea of characters being aware that they're in a Classical pastiche, and reading their own inspirational text as a guide, could have been a clever metafictional touch, but I personally did not feel too keen on it here. Then there's, like, some kind of genetic modification and cloning angle straight out of a lesser Goosebumps installment, complete with "You ever heard of that sheep they cloned?" as a Hail Mary for plausibility. The main cloner is a tittering capital-V Villain who makes Cyclopses because... he is a short man. And then we learn our four protagonists each have power over some cliched elemental magic, because why not, and there's a Tibetan bodhisattva thrown in, because maybe what this book needs is another wild, dangling thematic thread.

And for some reason, like seemingly all car-apocalypse novels set in SoCal, Love has its characters take weeks to travel from LA to Las Vegas. I've done that drive. Even picking your way around cracks and wrecks, if you manage to travel by car the entire way, even at ten miles an hour, it should take you two days, tops, with ample time for sleep. Of course, there's a random detour way down to the Salton Sea for no real reason (a remnant of a prior draft?), but still, if you're going at anything faster than a walking pace, you won't need weeks to make the trip.

Anyway. If that doesn't sound like a total mess that should have been pared down to, say, four or five separate (and internally thematically coherent) novels, I haven't even mentioned the worst part of Love: the prose is awful. YA writing rarely scintillates, but Rainbow Rowell could wring exquisite earnestness from YA romance, and J. K. Rowling mastered the art of making words fly so fast off the page, you scarcely noticed reading 600 pages in a day. Prose taste is, to an extent, subjective, but I just could not adjust to Block's herky-jerk lack of cadence and her clunky phrasing. I abandoned Holly Black's Tithe for similar reasons only ten pages in, but I wanted to give Love the benefit of the doubt, for the same reason that I'm rating it, if anything, too generously: the world needs more queer fiction.