The Waters and the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block
Block, Francesca Lia (2009). The waters and the wild. NY: HarperTeen. 113 pages.
I just don’t know what to think about Francesca Lia Block anymore. I’ve always been a fan of her delicately gothic urban fantastic young adult novels; lately, however, I’ve felt a bit let down. I had read an interview with FLB in Voice of Youth Advocates in which the author had discussed both The waters and the wild and a second upcoming book, Pretty dead. Intrigued, I put both on hold at the library. The Waters and the wild showed up first.
A short novel in Block’s more mythologically conscious style, Waters describes Bee, a thirteen-year-old girl more comfortable in the garden (where she contemplates ingesting the rich soil) than among others. When Bee is visited by a doppelganger, she befriends two fellow outcasts–Haze, a schoolmate who belives he half alien and half human; and Sarah, who believes she is a reincarnated slave–and discovers that she is a changeling, the daughter of a fairy queen who has been swapped with a human baby.
The FLB brand of magical realism is here in spades but is tempered by what seems to be overt politicizing. While FLB’s novels have certainly never been apolitical, in this latest short work, references to global warming and the twin towers pepper the prose and bits of poetry woven in the story. These poetic images strike me as a little too much, a little too deliberately and delicately precious in their coy specificity. While some might argue that FLB’s allusion to AIDS in Weetzie Bat makes a deadly disease into an inappropriate metaphor, I thought it was the fact that Block dared to evoke its metaphoric potential that made this political aspect of that novel strong. Here, there are no metaphors, only the report of the didactic hammer.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep waiting for my copy of Pretty Dead, the novel FLB describes as a vampire novel deliberately written in a popular style. I’m curious to see how it turns out.