The disclaimer here is that everyone else I know who read this book liked it, but I felt so strongly about this book after I read it I had to put my two cents in anyway, even knowing that I may be going against the grain here. It's difficult to say what age I would ever consider recommending this book to because the message and subject matter here seems a bit mature for young teens, yet the entire thing feels like it's written at about a fourth grade reading level. The characters exist in a sort...

Zero, zero ZERO stars if I could. Oh, mercy. I only managed to finish reading this because it was short. And with its reputation, I thought it might get less awful at some point.Spoiler: it never got less awful. And now my face hurts from grimacing this long.Are these characters supposed to be this unlikeable? I mean, I know they're supposed to be just DARLING levels of rebellious cool. That much is clear. I mean, they wear kimonos and Indian headdresses so obviously they're really unique. And t...

really hated this book for the first couple pages, couldn't believe i was supposed to read an entire bookful of this happy hippie treacly bullshit, then i abruptly burst into tears at the end of the first chapter and loved it from there on out. reminds me a little bit of hemingway in the way that complaints about it seem to center around a perceived lack of emotional depth, whereas all i see (after those first few pages) is a constant battle against darkness and pain. it's mystifying. anyway, i

A surreal story. I really enjoyed this. What a pleasant surprise. The themes in the book are very adult - sex, drugs and the story is magical. It reads like poetry and it's not poetry. I have heard a lot about this book and I'm so glad I finally checked it out. Weetzie lives in this fairy tale story with her gay best friend, his lover and her own lover. The words are somehow magic as well. I don't know how the book did what it did and I love it. It is short on details and plot. A lot happens in

I know of many people who really enjoyed this book a lot, but I personally found it confusing, short-sighted, and almost pointless. It tells the fantastical story of Weetzie Bat and her friends who live happily in a fantasy-land California, seemingly dreamlike state. Everything that occurs is very far-fetched to me, and even if it were a fairy tale, I could not find or come up with a theme for this really ambiguous novella.The characters are extremely one-dimensional,and all the problems that th...

Read for MLIS electiveSome of this was nice (found family!) and some things did NOT age well (certain character names, the cultural appropriation). I liked the fabulism aspects though!And as a non Californian the LA references were wasted on me, hah. Content warning: death of a parent, questionable diversity representation

This is such a strange book, but after three reads it does mostly hold up. The main weird thing is that it's very hard to place what age group this book was written for. It's barely 100 pages long, and short pages at that, making it the length of an easy reader. But the main characters are young adults dealing with love, rejection, bad hookups, and heartbreak. There are mentions of drug abuse and of the growing severity of the AIDS crisis (the book was published in 1989). I first read it at age

Only just discovered this 1989 novel, which appeared to have been a sensation and seeded a series.This is a sweet, dream-like, fantasy novella about teenagers creating a world—appropriately enough, in Los Angeles (there is a chapter called "Shangri-L.A.") which is already the portal for myth-making, fantasy creation and alternate realities.The language here is understated and crisp, and the mood, as claimed, is "transcendent."

this book would have changed my life had i been given it when i was stuck in long island and forced to hang around fuckhead fratguys who alternated between blowing bong-hits to bob marley and working out repressed homosexuality by pummelling pale skinny weak kids. perhaps this book would have forced all the self-loathing (due to the conflict between wondering why i wasn’t like said fuckheads and the deep repulsion i felt toward them) to turn outward and i might’ve pulled some kind of columbine d...

I was expecting something amazing. This book didn't just let me down, it actually vaguely disgusted me on many, many levels. Yeah, I get that it is a fairy tale of sorts and so doesn't have any obligation to be realistic. That doesn't excuse badly written characters, forced plot turns and badly written conversations though. I mean, just compare this to anything by Gaiman - Anansi Boys and American Gods are also fairytales happening in modern day USA, but manage not to be completely awful. I unde...

Plot: When Dirk meets Weetzie in high school, they hit it off immediately; they wear the coolest clothes and they drive around Los Angeles in their "slinkster cool" car. They form an unconventional family when Duck and My Secret Agent Lover Man come into the picture. As a family they create movies and then one day, Weetzie decides to have a baby. She has the baby with Duck and Dirk, which upsets My Secret Agent Lover Man, but he gets over it and brings his child, Witch Baby, in order to live wit...

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" protagonist...

***may be spoilers***To be perfectly honest in my rating of this book, I had to give it one star, because I genuinely did not like it. This is not because it's a bad book - in fact, it may very well be a spectacular book - for someone else. It was not my cup of tea.I like to have a sense of what time a story is set in, how much time has passed. In the first chapter, Weetzie is implied to be in high school and then suddenly she and her friend Dirk have inherited a house from Grandma Fifi. It was

2.5 out of 5Weeetzie Bat is definitely unusual and original, like a shimmering dream. I would imagine that's what the world looks like when you are on drugs. The novel also touches upon some tough subjects, such as infidelity, death, drugs, homosexuality, abortion and AIDS. However, it desperately lacks depth: the characters are one-dimensional and the problems are only briefly mentioned and then magically fixed or not dealt with at all. But that didn't bother me that much (it kind of felt appro...

Weezie is something of a geration-X Holly Golightly, without the tragedy; she's everything a mixed up, affected, over-the-top poetry-and-creative-writing highschool student from the late 90s who was raised on too much Molly Ringwald and Duckie wanted to be. The story is breezy and fun, with Weezie, Dirk, and Secret Angent Lover Man tripping lightly from one adventure to the next, learning to live, love, and make successful underground movies in a Hollywood that actually has all the glitz and gla...

"You get three wishes," the genie said. "I wish for a Duck for Dirk, and My Secret Agent Lover Man for me, and a beautiful little house for us to live in happiliy ever after." "Your wishes are granted. Mostly," said the genie.My wishes were not granted, mostly. I was prepared to read a short, but pleasantly shocking, quirky urban young adult fantasy novel of the ageless sort. Something that has earned being referenced in every other modern fairytale review. But I was disappointed by something s

I first read this in the late 90s and loved it to pieces; I read it two or three times back then, and wished desperately that I could live in a world as magical and exotic and amazing as the one Block envisioned. Looking back, I completely understand what I saw in it, because there's a lot of good; Weetzie is true to herself, learns to reject destructive relationship and self-sabotaging behaviour, forges a non-traditional family, and does it all with glitter and rose petals and kitschy LA souven...

http://www.stevenmoore.info/photos.shtmlSee Moore's review of Block's stuff in his forthcoming My Back Pages: Reviews and Essays."If you're not a teenage girl, you may be unfamiliar with Francesca Lia Block's works. She's the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Young Adult fiction, Judy Blume gone punk and New Age, the patron saint of goth gurls into both Nine Inch Nails and Shakespeare.[...] Imagine Ronald Firbank as a Valley girl with a heliotrope Mohawk. That's why there are many of us who are neit

I just re-read this the other night, for the first time since I was a young teen in the early '90s. I remember it as a Book That Made Me Want To Write Books. It expanded my vision of what was possible, bookwise.It pretty much holds up. If anything, it's even *more* impressive to me, now, that someone was able to publish a lush but spare novel (I think it should be called a novel, even though it must clock in at not much more than 10,000 words) for tweens that deals with topics like gay love, AID...

If it weren't for these books, adolescence would have killed me, or at least made me incredibly lame.This book probably had a bigger impact on me than any other single thing I've ever read, before or since.