Thursday, February 22, 2018

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Francesca Lia Block
Completed 2/22/2018, Reviewed 2/22/2018
4 stars

This book was inducted into the Gaylactic Spectrum Award Hall of Fame.  It’s an omnibus of five short novels about a girl named Weetzie Bat, her friends and children.  Reading these lesser known but award winning books is always a craps shoot.   You never know what you’re going to get.  Sometimes I wonder how some of these books ever won awards, or were even nominated.  This book starts out rather weird, with a strange prose style and clearly written for YA.  I had my doubts.  But with each story, the prose matures, like the Harry Potter series, as if the author knew her fan base was getting older too.  I was hesitant liking the book with the first few stories, but was completely engrossed in the later stories.


Weetzie is a California girl who builds a family of eclectic characters around her.  They are all searching for love and acceptance.  Most of her friends have wild names.  For example, her beloved is My Secret Agent Lover Man, and her step-daughter is Witch Baby.  The characters are not very deeply drawn, but I still got attached to them.  They are all colorful and go through some journey of self-doubt and discovery. 

The stories are like fairy tales with magical realism.  There are ghosts and a genie and lots of strange happenings.  They range from Weetzie meeting My Secret Agent Lover Man, to the teen crises of her daughters, to the coming out sagas of her best friends.  The stories, while fanciful, are still pretty deep, covering topics like love, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, interracial relationships, and AIDS. 


Despite really liking this book, I don’t have much to say.  The stories are too short to go into much detail without giving spoilers.  So rather than try to just fill up space, I’ll conclude with giving this book four stars out of five.  

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