Necklace of Kisses Book

Hurray, i didn't have to borrow this from the library after all1: shveta lent it to me.

it's brave and good. i feel as if the prose rhythms are in some ways more awkward than in block's earlier weetzie bat stories. but what that implies to me is that she may have had difficulty writing it, but pushed through anyway. the story is good and i feel like it's very important, at least to this reader, that block got around at some point to addressing how a "young adult 'magical-realist'" character like weetzie might start to feel as she got older, and "no longer sylph-like and utterly charming." especially living in l.a. and working in the film industry, my god!

seriously, i'd like to see her come back to this. i wish she would return to weetzie at forty-five, at fifty, at sixty. i also wish that she'd do a serious examination, someday, at some time, of the relationship between goodness, happiness, and beauty in her worlds. all her positive characters always have been intensely attractive, just by their nature, and naturally skinny. only bad, older, vicious, decadent people ever get fat in her magical l.a.. and people who feel bad about themselves because they're not blonde need to discover their inner beauty, but, um, none of them were ever actually handed a homely exterior to begin with. (the exotically sexy witch baby, who is tiny, muscular, caramel-colored, and has high cheekbones and 'tilty purple eyes,' but who feels bad about herself because she has curly dark hair instead of straight blonde hair, is a case in point.

i mean, come on: i do know what it feels like to have tangly dark hair when everyone else is a straight caucasian blonde, but at the same time, it's not too hard to find media images glamorizing this version of "exotic" beauty. what's harder to deal with is that some of us actually do have body fat, big asses and pimples. did that make me inherently a less deserving or magical pre-teenager than the girl who lived next door, who had higher cheekbones and slender thighs? would she have been admitted to the company of jacaranda, fairies and self-actualization in block's shangri-l.a., while i would have been relegated to a villain or a jealous sidekick? rereading these stories as an adult,
i'd really like to understand how that works in block's worlds.