Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block (review)

After a massive earthquake and tsunami devastate Los Angeles and possibly the entire U.S., Penelope is alone in her seaside home when looters come, one of them a mysterious man named Merk, who insists that she take his van and go find her parents with a map he has provided. The map launches Pen on a journey that loosely follows the exploits of Odysseus, re-imagined, in Block's familiar dreamlike fashion, in the ruined locales of her beloved city. Pen encounters the brutal, genetically engineered giants who are responsible for the earthquake and whose creation is linked to her father, a former scientist who incurred the wrath of his partner, Kronen, when he protested his experiments. She also attracts a crew of survivors: Hex, a beautiful transman living among the lotus eaters; Ez, a boy enslaved by a Circe-like character named Beatrix; and Ash, a strikingly handsome boy with an alluring voice. Over the course of their journey, Pen and Hex and then Ez and Ash fall in love and face the terrors of their new world together, but Pen's goal of finding her family never wavers. Block's self-conscious efforts to fuse multiple mythologies and genres has the logical weakness common to dreams: the plot is disjointed and often unsatisfying, with convenient appearances of Merk whenever Pen comes to a dead end, and magic elements appearing randomly to explain the otherwise inexplicable, not to mention the completely unrealistic and wish-fulfilling conclusion. Like a dream, however, what holds the novel together is a consistent emotional tone, here one of exhausted determination in the face of loss and mourning, rendered aesthetically beautiful, though gory, by Block's prose. The result is more collage than story, offering only tenuous narrative or thematic coherence, but diverse readers will certainly latch on to different, undeniably sparkly bits.