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Title: The Carbon Diaries, 2015
Author: Saci Lloyd
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Why I Read It: When a Texas librarian says she really can’t recommend a book enough, you listen.

Summary: By 2015, global warming is a reality no one can ignore. And unfortunately for 16-year-old Londoner Laura, the UK becomes the first country to mandate carbon rationing. Which means cutting back on her punk rock band practice and taking the bus to school, not to mention all the fights at home about who’s been using up too many carbon credits.

Review: Props for timing on this one. This is the kind of book I’d love to write. So yeah, I was pretty much seething with jealousy when I started reading it.

But Laura’s snark soon distracted me.

We had a power outage in the night. The house is so cold now, it feels like 200 years of evil chill creeping into my bones. Reminds me of the Great Storm. Power outages give me the creeps—you know when you go to switch the light on and it’s dead? It was so freezing I went shopping to Waitrose with Mum and Dad just to keep my blood moving.

Super-strange experience. It was all dark in there cos they’d switched off loads of lights and the aircon and those fans that waft baking bread smells around. It was just like a big warehouse. It was pretty funny, all the nice middle-class people pretending they weren’t panic buying and that it was completely normal for them to be pushing six carts around, totally bulging with stuff. The staff kept making people put things back at the checkout cos they’d gone over their CO points.

My mother nearly had a fight with this other woman over a multipack of garlic and basil pasta.

Laura’s language is clever, fresh. (Or maybe that’s how all British teens talk?)

The only thing I didn’t love is that sometimes when characters were sharing information about the state of the world, I felt a teensy bit preached to. In some of those situations, I would rather see something not be 100% explained, leaving a little to the reader’s imagination.

But even so, I loved this book like a trip to Ibiza during carbon rationing. And I’m very much looking forward to the sequel coming out next year!

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

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