Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block
My rating: 4/5 cats
it is so awesome being me. every day is a contradiction, every opinion is unpredictable and inconsistent. i surprise myself daily: i love the coen brothers, but i hate the big lebowski. how is this possible?? i hate cutie-pie whimsical movies, but i loved amelie. wuuh?
the excitement of living my life is that i am always surprised by how i will respond; the world is a big exciting oyster of possibility.
this book has everything going against my expected tastes: slick language, “cool” protagonists, l.a. setting, staccato prose…
but against all odds, i am charmed! it is a glossy fairytale; a world without consequences that just shimmers breezily along in this surface-only realm where everything is kind of coasting on a sea of mood stabilizers with no emotional depth.
that doesn’t sound good, does it??
i don’t know what i like about this. it is showy, it is flashy, it is short and fast. this is like a quickie in a gay bar on ecstasy.
it is like those plastic smiling families from the happy past, but some of the nether parts are repeated.
it is not all happy, but the sad parts, the scary parts, the parts that oprah-books would milk for a couple hundred pages are just… dealt with. rapidly. pregnancy, infidelity, death, sickness; it’s the prettiest treatment of these themes i have ever seen.
just an all-around beautiful sweet book.
but truly the worst cover i have ever ever seen.
