love in a green climate

The TV writer Jennifer Cowan's first novel Earthgirl ("Ages 14 and up") has a 16-year old heroine, Sabine, who turns into an eco-warrior.

In an interview earlier this year, the author discussed her take on Young Adult fiction:

I found that books that were issue-oriented seemed heavy handed, and books that were fun and chatty were frivolous and at times a bit morally bankrupt.

Cowan set out to do a chatty book - there are lots of blog entries with genuine urls - that was also a morality struggle. Online, Earthgirl continues to blog and to tweet. There's a Facebook page too.

Earthgirl is a book about love, friendship and the environment and how these three can clash. In yesterday's New York Times, the critic Regina Marler writes

I remember college friends discovering the animal rights movement; they described suddenly perceiving a layer of cruelty under everything around them.

This is Sabine’s awakening, subtly and thoroughly explored by the author. Sabine begins to realize the rippling social and ecological effects of her smallest choices: an exhilarating but exhausting process, during which she loses her two best friends.