Saci Lloyd

Laura Brown relates her journal of her year in 2015. UK goes on carbon rationing, limits energy usage by citizens. Results in widespread power cuts, loss of water, heating etc. which throws country into chaos. Protests for/against rationing worldwide, police/army violence often resorted to.

Laura is in a band called the dirty angels, who sing about green punky stuff. Her sister, Kim, is trafficking black market carbon, as well as angry at parents. Dad loses job and goes crazy with gardening, Mum joins Women Moving Forward and becomes slightly mad. She herself is trying to get with neighbour Ravi Datta. Other neighbours are Kieran, gay hairdresser trying to launch Carbon Dating, and Arthur, old ex-rich guy who helps with homework etc.

She is generally negative towards politicans etc. Blames companies for waste, forcing people on rationing - in music. Hates the new living conditions, but also hates those who won't put up with it (rich). Eventually ends up living through the disputes of their parents at wolf camp in the forest, before coming back to have a end-book crisis involving London flooding and NDEs.

Shows the impact of carbon reduction as incredibly bad, but suggests slower reforms are possible.… (más)

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It sort of starts okay. Mikey is pretending to like this social hacktivist in order to get into a girl's pants and instead finds himself whisked away through a rip in the space-time continuum towards a parallel universe which is like earth, but with way worse spelling.

It was this last thing that immediately annoyed me. I don't like it when for the sake of it, authors start to change the way words are written to show how much something is unlike something else. It is a way of telling instead of showing, and besides, it is migraine invoking. This particular book had a character who liked to switch the first letters of random words. You sidn't dee that coming, yid dou? So edgy.

The story than has been describes as like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I missed the charm. I was disappointed with It's the End of the World as We Know It.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!… (más)

The Guardian had an article about the 5 greatest books about climate change and this one was the only one I had not read. So I reserved it from the library and dug into it the past few days. While perhaps not as good as some of the other books on the list such The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood it was pretty decent.

Written in 2009 it postulates that by 2015 there would be catastrophic climate occurrences and that Great Britain would impose carbon rationing on all its populace. Laura Brown in 16 years old when the carbon rationing takes place and she starts her diary on January 1. Each citizen is given a carbon card for the year and if they use up all their carbon allowance before the end of the year they will have no electricity or food or transportation until the next year. Laura isn't a big consumer as she rides her bike or takes public transport to go to school but she misses things like fruit from the tropics and being able to download music whenever she wants. She is probably the one in her family most able to cope as her older sister, Kim, wanted to spend her gap year in New York, her mother can't figure out how to take the bus and really misses her car and her father loses his job teaching travel and tourism because no-one is going anywhere. The weather is brutal--too cold in winter and too hot and dry in summer and a devastating storm surge in the fall. Through it all Laura is trying to be a normal teenager who plays in a punk rock band and falls in love with the gorgeous boy next door.

Reading this in 2017 one can be thankful that the global climate isn't as bad as what Ms Lloyd postulates but, on the other hand, there is no evidence that people have realized how bad our energy hogging lifestyle is. Even the US President denies that climate change exists but every year examples of out of control weather patterns keep coming. Eastern Canada has just been inundated by flood waters, the Horn of Africa has experienced drought and famine for years and tornadoes and hurricanes occur earlier every year.… (más)