Review – The Island of Excess Love (Love in the Time of Global Warming, Book 2) by Francesca Lia Block (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic
Length: 224 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Release Date: August 26, 2014
ISBN-13: 978-0805096316
Stand Alone or Series: 2nd book in the Love in the Time of Global Warming series
Source: Borrowed from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars
This was an okay sequel to Love in the Time of Global Warming. I didn’t like it nearly as much as the original book, although there was some beautiful imagery throughout.
Pen and her friends are making a life for themselves in the pink house on the beach. The world has ended but they are still surviving. Then a mysterious boat shows up on the shore and this boat brings up all the bad in our characters’ pasts and makesthem relive it. Our characters end up heading out on yet another adventure to the Island of Excess Love. The story was written to loosely follow Virgil’s Aeneid.
The plot is very straight-forward and predictable, not nearly as dreamy and ambiguous as Love in the Time of Global Warming. I always enjoy Block’s beautiful sparkle in her writing, but that just wasn’t present in this book. The beautiful description is there, but our character feel downtrodden and tired…they aren’t finding beauty in this desolate world like they did in the first book.
The characters are not nearly as easy to engage with as they were in the first book either. In fact I flat out disliked them throughout much of the story. They make very poor decisions and treat each other poorly, there isn’t much heroic about this story.
Overall this was an okay read but a disappointing follow up to Love in the Time of Global Warming. Everything about this story felt tired. I would only recommend reading if you really loved Love in the Time of Global Warming and are dying to find out what happened to Pen and crew after that book.
This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– Flights of Fantasy Reading Challenge
