The Carbon Diaries 2015

April 6, 2009
Global warming is rapidly changing the world in Lloyd's accomplished first novel, in which the United Kingdom, still reeling from the Great Storm, becomes the first nation on Earth to institute mandatory carbon rationing, a 60% decrease in all energy use. Sixteen-year-old Laura just wants to pass her classes, play with her band and maybe catch the eye of cute neighbor Ravi. With the weather tipping wildly out of control, she and her highly dysfunctional family (“We are officially the bad family on the street now, the family that other families call the cops on”) must contend with blackouts, water shortages and riots, followed by torrential rains and the flooding of London. This gritty eco-thriller, made up of Laura's diary entries throughout the year 2015, features a nicely developed sense of place, complex and believable characters and an all-too-plausible near-future scenario, as Britons make do, pull together and triumph over adversity. Fans of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
and Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now
should find this book a gripping read. Ages 12–up.

Starred review from May 1, 2009
Gr 8 Up-Laura Brown's diary of 2015 charts the first year of carbon rationing in Great Britain. The global climate has declined so precipitously that the country has made the unilateral decision to cut its carbon emissions by 60 percent. Everyone is issued a card that tracks their allowable use of carbon for the year. This limits utility usage, travel, and purchase of anything that has been transported over a distance, including food. Laura has to cope with limits to hygiene, cell phone use, and practice time with her band and listen to lectures on reducing energy consumption. Her father's job as Head of Travel and Tourism at a local college is eliminated. Freezing weather is followed by hot drought and flooding to finish off the year. Her family initially reacts badly to the strainsher parents fight, her dad starts drinking but then tries his hand at home agriculture, her mom joins the Women Moving Forward club, and her sister, Kim, disappears for days at a time and almost dies when a cholera epidemic hits the city. The book refers to itself as an eco-thriller but it doesn't present the usual over-the-top characters and hardly believable events of so many books in that genre. It works so well because of all the normal craziness of life that has nothing to do with the environmental disaster. The family crisis, the colorful supportive neighbors, the crush on the cute boy next door, and the triumphs of Laura's band lend the story verisimilitude that will give it appeal far beyond the usual thriller for doom-and-gloom junkies."Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2009
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* In the way that Cory Doctorows Little Brother (2008) was a tale of national security run amok, this is a similar cautionary look at global warming. Laura Brown, a 16-year-old Londoner and punk rocker, documents a year in the very near future, 2015, in diary form. She refers to recent massive storms brought on by climate change that have ravagedthe planetand led Britain to be the first country to try carbon rationing. Each person is allotted a prohibitively small measure of carbon points to be used each month, essentially obsoleting such luxuries as air travel or even heating ones home. Laura navigates the increasingly punishing circumstances with a perfectly intoned half-bitter, half-astonished teenagers voice, complete with strains of near-future slang, and punctuates her diary with newspaper clippings and othertaped-in bits of cultural detritus. As she weathers staggering uncertainty, kill-me-now family crises, and a timelessly confusing dating scene, she finds a release valve in music and her mates. Lloyds immersive first novel, if a bit overlong, is transformative without ever being didactic and teases out information with remarkable restraint that never feels like withholding. While the book ends without a clean resolution, that only adds to a realism that, while certainly alarmist, could well be prophetic. Deeply compulsive and urgently compulsory reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)