Love In The Time Of Global Warming

Overview

Francesca Lia Block's novel reimagines Homer's Odyssey in a Los Angeles remade by catastrophe. After a massive earthquake, called the Earth Shaker, tears apart the city, a teenager named Pen loses her home and her sense of safety along with it. With little more than instinct and a battered copy of the ancient epic, she leaves the wreckage of her old life behind to search for the family she's been separated from.

What follows is a journey through a landscape that has become strange and unpredictable. Pen encounters people and creatures who test her trust at every turn, from communities offering hollow assurances of security to engineered beings bred for violence. Threaded through the danger is a quieter transformation, as Pen discovers reserves of courage and perception she hadn't known she possessed.

Block also gives Pen a creative inheritance from her journey: visions that arrive almost unbidden, which she learns to shape into stories. Those stories become a way of making sense of loss and of binding herself to the small community of survivors she travels alongside.

Myth, Disaster, and the Making of a Storyteller

By grafting the architecture of Homer's epic onto a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Block places her novel in a long tradition of myth retellings while using the disaster setting to ask more immediate questions about resilience and reinvention. The Odyssey functions less as a strict template than as a companion text Pen reads for guidance, a device that lets the novel reflect on how old stories help people interpret new and frightening circumstances.

The book also sits comfortably within Block's broader body of work, which has long favored dreamlike imagery, lyrical prose, and young women who find their power through imagination and storytelling rather than conventional heroics. Here, that sensibility is applied to survival fiction, a genre more often built around physical endurance than interior life. The result leans toward the literary end of young adult dystopian fiction, more concerned with Pen's psychological and artistic awakening than with world-building mechanics or action sequences, even as it doesn't shy away from the brutality of its setting.

Why Love in the Time of Global Warming Has Been Challenged

Violence is the most consistent concern raised about this novel, particularly its depiction of cloned, man-eating giants and a predatory antagonist who stalks Pen with lethal intent. Reviewers objecting to the book have pointed to scenes of bodily harm and menace as too graphic or disturbing for the age range typically assigned the book in schools and libraries.

Some objections also extend to the bleakness of the book's post-disaster setting itself, with critics arguing that its portrayal of societal collapse, predation, and false refuge presents young readers with an unrelentingly grim view of human and institutional failure. Sexual content and mature themes tied to Pen's coming-of-age have been cited as well, reflecting broader unease with young adult fiction that pairs survival narratives with adolescent sexuality and trauma. Taken together, these concerns have led to the book being challenged or removed in 2 states and 4 districts tracked in this catalog, generally on the grounds that its content is unsuitable for the students who might encounter it on school shelves.