This review originally posted at More Than Just Magic 
 Love in the Time of Global Warming is a beautiful, heart wrenching tale of one girl against a destroyed world and the friends they gained along the way. It's a tale of survival, and love and hope that I think everyone should read. 
 Francesca Lia Block writes beautifully. Her style is almost lyrical with phrases such as "Now this love was just another loss in a sea bubbling with corpses of loss." I was reading a digital copy of this book and I have never used the highlighting and notes feature on my Kindle so much. I love the way the writing paints a picture that isn't quite reality and isn't quite fantasy. This book is technically set in the real world - an earthquake torn Los Angeles. It's grounded in something that could happen. But then it's given a twist into the surreal. At times it's hard to tell when the metaphor ends or begins but once you let go of the traditional notions of reality it's easy to lose yourself in the setting. 
 Pen (our heroine) finds herself on a journey to find her mother and brother, who she was separated from during the earthquake. This journey closely parallels The Odyssey, the book she is reading along the way. It should be no surprise then that her journey ends up becoming quite epic in nature. There's everything from giants, to Monarch butterflies sent as signs from the heavens. 
 But to me the journey was secondary to the amazing characters we meet along the way. Particularly Pen. She is such a great complex character. Sometimes she's strong and brave but other times she's terrified, weak and angry. Sometimes she's all of these things at the same time. But you can't judge her by her weak moments. Those moments are what make her human. It's how normal people would react. What's important is what she does after those moments. How she keeps going, keeps fighting, no matter how bad things get. I also loved how dedicated she was to the friends she meets in her travels. She couldn't feed them, they didn't know exactly where they were going but they drew strength from one another. 
 I also want to point out the theme of sexuality throughout Love in the Time of Global Warming. It's treated as something fluid, versatile (which is something I talked about in my review of Freakboy). I appreciated that Francesca Lia Block didn't follow conventional norms when approaching this subject. There are no neat little boxes for everyone to fit into, just people and love. A positive message that I think people of all ages need to be constantly reminded of. 
 Love in the Time of Global Warming is one of those novels that comes out of the blue and blows you away. It's beautiful and poetic and I could read it over and over again. Highly recommended.