Saci Lloyd

Genre: Near Future, dystopian, climate change fiction, interpersonal relationships, social change

The Dust Cover Copy

It's the year 2015, and global warming is ravaging the environment. In response, the United Kingdom mandates carbon rationing. When her carbon debit card arrives in the mail, sixteen-year-old Laura is just trying to handle the pressure of exams, keep her straight-X punk band on track, and catch the attention of her gorgeous classmate Ravi. But as multiple natural disasters strike and Laura's parents head toward divorce, her world spirals out of control. With the highest-category hurricane in history heading straight toward London, chronicling the daily insanity is all Laura can do to stay grounded in a world where disaster is the norm.

The Scene

Worldbuilding

When you’re a teenager, a lot of things can feel like the end of the world. The garage band breaking up. Your parents fighting. Your crush tuning you out.

Into this speculative contemporary story, Lloyd throws all that, and carbon rationing that upends entire ways of life on top of it. It makes for a powerful, wonderfully snarky and completely relatable story.

Told through the eyes of Laura, a punkette with a rising garage band and a painfully square family smack dab in the Suburban Householder set, we get to see the story of the world remaking itself through the eyes of everyday folks for once. This isn’t a story of grand gestures or grand tragedy. This is the story of what it’s like to live in a country trying to sort out carbon taxation and the real cost of our carbon use. It is a pragmatic story, coming head-to-head with all the daily issues that the big speeches in Parliment so often gloss over. There’s no heroes and battles here; there’s the next door boy freeing the rabbits that his dad was raising for meat when he’s told he has to kill them, the fact that mangoes cost far too much in carbon to ship around the world, and the struggle to find your place in a mixed up world when you’re a mixed up kid yourself. By giving us a look at a country coming to grips with the real environmental costs of their actions and struggling to take in what they see, we get to explore that fraught time that comes during transition. The details in this work make everything incredibly real: the neighbor down the street dealing in the black carbon market, the people who run over their carbon budget at the end of the month and get their stove turned off in the middle of dinner, and the way people change in response to changing environments of all sorts. Some people fall apart. Some put themselves back together. Some find hidden strength. Some scream, and some cry. And, even in the dark, some grab their guitars and sing.

The Crowd

Characterization

A cast of characters drawn straight out of the London suburbs, these characters are a completely relatable and absolutely human, in the good ways and bad ways. You’ll smile in commiseration. You’ll roll your eyes in tandem with the main character because parents, man. And yet, you can see it from the parents’ point of view too, and that just makes the pathos of this story that much more bittersweet. I really appreciated this gathering of souls; they get across everything the author wants to say about humanity, society and change, while still seeming like real and believable people you could meet on a London street rather than proxies for the author’s stances, which sometimes happens in progressive tales. Lloyd jumps that stumbling block in grand style, giving us the kinds of neighbors in the kind of community that we can believe. You’ll be as exasperated, concerned, annoyed, outraged and proud as you be would of your own neighborhood when you read this story.

The Lingo

Writing Style

The hook of this tale is in the telling: offered up in first person by Laura in the format of a series of journal entries, this is an unabashedly UK Teen book, drawing you into Laura’s world with its completely informal, honest and open delivery. Everything is right there on the page, in all its conflicted, confused and messy glory. Anyone who remembers being a teen and feeling like everything is going out of control will relate to this book. This format couldn’t have fit the material better.

The Moves

Plot

This isn’t an easy book with everything wrapped up in a neat bow. It won’t give you all the answers, and it won’t promise you that everything is going to be okay. But in letting us explore how everything could go in the near future, giving us believable events and a story for the everyman on every street, what this story does do is show us that whatever comes, we can figure out how to get through it.

Overall Rating

A fun, scrappy and snappy story full of teenage energy, climate change and blunt cockney can-do. Grab a copy, you’ll be glad you did.