Love in the Time of Global Warming

After the devastating Earth Shaker, Penelope sets out into the brutal Los Angeles landscape in search of her beloved family. Both Block's imagining of this story and her protagonist's quest are inspired by the Odyssey -- Pen blinds an eye of a monster and stops at the Lotus Hotel inhabited by blissfully intoxicated survivors, where an intriguing boy named Hex reads to her from his copy of Homer's epic; Hex joins her on the journey, and the pair often consults the tattered book, cognizant of parallels as they carry on. After picking up two other teens, the group continues through the ruins to Las Vegas for a climactic coming-together of the plot's many complex elements. Despite the story's driving force of survival, it is also about these characters' connections -- love that transcends gender and circumstance. Every step of the way, Block's imagery is remarkable, aided by the intellectual narrator's direct references not only to Homer but also to art: "The creatures, with their shadowed eyes and sunken mouths, and the slabs of raw meat hanging from hooks, remind me of the Francis Bacon painting. . ." The juxtapositions, too, are pulled off flawlessly: the disgusting, deathly, anxious, and devastating are, improbably -- through Pen's astute eyes -- also beautiful, lively, serene, and hopeful. Block achieves these and other heroic literary feats in this sophisticated melding of post-apocalyptic setting, re-imagined classic, and her signature magical realism. katrina hedeen