Weetzie Bat

When I spied the YA novel Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block at Half Price Books, one scrap of memory came to mind "…this book changed my life." I couldn't remember who said it, or where I had read it, or maybe it was just a blurb from the publishing companies; but if it had the power to change somebody's life, it was worth a look. It was short. It dealt with "a bleach-blond punk pixie… who lived a life of surf and slam." Well, for fifty cents, that was good enough for my bookshelf at school.

Flash forward to the beginning of a December when a girl in my third period class approached me with a dilemma: she knew that she wouldn't be able to finish her novel before the end of grading period, let alone the project showing me what she'd learned from the novel. Ahhh… Mr. Fisher to the rescue... "I've got just the book for you, a bit quirky, short, and it will change your life." After a couple of days, she asks if she can speak to me...

"Sure, how'd you like the book? What do you mean you can't do a novel project on it? It's weird? You don't understand it? Well, tell me what it's about, and maybe I can come up with something. Okay, let me get this straight (pun intended)… this girl lives with two gay guys and her boyfriend doesn't want to have a baby, so she decides to have a baby with the two gay guys, and they all plan on raising the baby together. The boyfriend finds out, is upset, and leaves. While the boyfriend is gone, he has sex with a witch and they have a baby, which he brings back to the girl and two gay guys. They decided to raise this other child as well, and they name it 'Witch Baby' and they actually call it 'Witch Baby'. Okay… that's enough. I'm obviously going to need to read this, so let's see what other short novels I have on my bookshelf."

Now that I've gotten around to reading the book, I think my student could've completed the novel project. She seemed to be having some difficulty understanding if these character's relationships were even possible, which combined with the modern fairytale style (who would've thought you'd run into witches and genies in Los Angeles) and the fact that I provided absolutely no scaffolding what-so-ever, made the possibility of this particular student coming up with any sort of a theme nearly impossible. If I'd had a little more knowledge of the book, I suspect we could've worked through this despite her discomfort.

--But could this novel be taught to a class? Possibly. The situations described above sound a bit crazy, but there are no explicit descriptions of sex in the book; and I think the author only uses the word 'shit' twice, and it seems strategic and artistically necessary. The author loves popular culture, but unlike the name-dropping of The Clique or Gossip Girl novels, she's just interested in selling a lust for life by describing experiences like finding a cool coat at a Goodwill store or hanging out at retro-styled chili dog stand. I don't think these specific experiences are in the book, but the novel reminded me of non-material (or just cheap) experiences that my friends and I treasured when I was a young and it was all about the newness of our independence, discovery and excitement. Yesh, I sound like some crumbling geezer in that sentence!

The book is also interesting in the way that the outsider/insider dynamic doesn't seem to apply. The characters are all insiders. We as readers might be outsiders, but that's our problem, and the author leaves us to figure it out for ourselves. I'm pretty sure that homophobia is absent from this setting, which is Los Angles, but it's referred to as a mythical 'Shangri-L.A.' where 'normal' situations don't apply or even exist for that matter. This group of people without blood relationships becomes their own family and puts their collective energy into making small independent movies. They feel at ease and inspired when creating their own world through these projects, reminding me of the literacy events described in the course pack, with Shakespeare's 'play within the play' concept interpreted through the 1980's D.I.Y. alternative spirit.

The conflicts of this novel, however, seem different than the course pack descriptions of LGBTQ YA novels. (Is that like one-quarter the alphabet?) The author focuses on the difficulties of the characters finding each other and building their family and losing older family members. Having grown up in the dawning of the AIDS crisis (more alphabet), I found the concluding chapter especially moving as the characters despair over the effect that the disease has on their community. Overall, the uniqueness of the book's quirky characters, their family relationship, the detailed and mythical setting, the almost lyrical writing style, and ground breaking content (especially at the time it was written in 1989), make this the kind of book that could… I don't know… change somebody's life or something.