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I sort of do feel compelled to read further in the series, but that's not necessarily a recommendation - I'm a compulsive. I have to read to the end of almost everything. Even the da Vinci FUUuuuuuuuuuuck.
I'm in two minds on "Weetzie Bat". It was certainly very *readable* - I tore through it in about 45 minutes. Possibly that's a factor in my ambivalence - there's not an awful lot of text there, and it seems odd to release this in such small and expensive chunks, especially since the subect matter suggests a teen audience.
Pro: The normality of the poly family group - or at least, that it is not represented as wrong or weird that the family group exists as it does. The readiness to deal with drug addiction, homosexuality, AIDS et al, which are often ignored in YA fiction, and also to deal with them in a consistently magic-realist way. The bit where Bam-Bam seroconverts in particular made me feel a bit teary, although that could have been general mood. If I was a child of a non-traditional unit dealing with issues of social acceptance and family bereavement, I'm sure I'd be very glad of this book.
Con: Hang on, I *am* and I'm not. The characters are not only irritatingly hip, but also have no real emotional weight - as Kit-Cat more positively says, they don't really exist. They float about without interiority, so it's hard to care when good things or bad things happen, because it doesn't seem like they do, really. Weetzie gets quasi-raped in the second chapter or so, and it just sort of wanders past.
Case in point - the decision to have a child. Weetzie and co. behave abominably - she decides forcibly and without consent to enrol Secret Agent etc. into the niche they have created for him, sleeps with her friends behind his back without even telling him, and then gets him back anyway, not because of anything she does, but just because she and her unit are so great. I sort of hope that Witch Baby turns out to be an agent of bloody Nemesis, but I imagine she's just going to be a goth, and cheer up a lot at the end of book two anyway. It's almost a textbook on how and why to behave unethically in a relationship, and my warm fuzzies about how nice it is to see the heterosexual binary disrupted do nothing to change that.
As Deva has observed, the non-white characters are sidelined - Jah Love and his wife feel like, if you'll excuse the phrasing, colour. SAetc's friend Coyote doesn't get a line, much less a plotline. They call their child Cherokee despite the Jeep Cherokee playing about as important a part in their lives as the Cherokee nation (she wears feathers. He had a mohawk. They fight tokenism). The gay characters are also sidelined, in a way - this is probably a symptom of the narrative focus being on Weetzie, and thus on her relationship with SAetc, and may not be universal, and it's still ahead on points for having gay characters who have sex (and possibly trick), so grumble grumble. My copy of Weetzie Bat had the opening chapter of Witch Baby, and the description of the Native Americans there - beautiful and picturesque and trusting and dying - gave me presentiments of Deva's comment.
I think the movies about their lives sum up in some ways my ambivalence - FLB is mythologising them mythologising themselves...
Hmmm. So, very mixed feelings. On the one, I'm glad that there are books out there presenting YAs with the idea that there is something other than the mechanisms of the romance novel or the adventure story. I certainly see what Deva means about the modern fairy story, and it is unfair in some ways to accuse it of being unrealistic when that is clearly not its intention. On the other, there's something very self-satisfied about the writing depicting them, and about the depictions - their sadnesses are temporally and physically brief, and I find their delight in being them a bit wearing. I'm hoping that Witch Baby will leaven that a bit, or pondering whether it may be the characters and that I should try a book of hers outside this series... or reread this one. Yes. |
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