Available:*
Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Juvenile Book | YA BLOCK F. | 1 | Juvenile Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... South | Juvenile Book | YA F BLOCK F | 1 | Juvenile Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... South | Juvenile Book | YA FIC BLOC | 1 | Juvenile Fiction | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... West | Paperback | HUM BLO | 1 | Fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Dirk MacDonald, a sixteen-year-old boy living in Los Angeles, comes to terms with being gay after he receives surreal storytelling visitations from his dead father and great-grandmother.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 UpA prequel to the popular books about Weetzie Bat and her circle of quirky friends and relatives. This novel is about her best pal, Dirk, in his pre-Weetzie days. He's in high school (in L.A., of course), living with Grandma Fifi and struggling with how to come out to his best friend and soulmate. Although Dirk never does tell Pup he's gay, Pup feels the sexual tension between them: "`I love you, Dirk,' Pup said. `But I can't handle it.'" In reaction, Dirk takes to slam dancing in punk joints. When a gang of gay bashers beats him up, he drags himself home and passes out. While he's unconscious, long-dead relatives he's never known come to him in what seem to be dreams; when he wakes in the hospital, he realizes that his grandmother has been telling him stories. Out of her comforting words about how others in his family have insisted on being themselves, his battered brain fashions hopeful hallucinations, including one of his future lover. His visions assure him that ``There was love waiting; love would come.'' Block writes distinctively and convincingly, interweaving the hallucination scenes smoothly. She makes the power of stories feltand here, more purposefully than ever before, she weaves a safety net of words for readers longing to feel at home with themselves. Gay teens in particular need this book. All fans of the series will relish meeting nice-guy Dirk as the tender Baby Be-Bop.Claudia Morrow, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Embroidering her prose with lushly romantic imagery, Block returns to the world of Weetzie Bat for this keenly felt story. A prequel of sorts to Weetzie Bat, the novel opens while Weetzie's best friend Dirk is still a child, lying on his mat at naptime. ``Dirk had known it since he could remember''-known, that is, that he is gay. Tenderly raised by Grandma Fifi, famous for her pastries and her 1955 Pontiac convertible, Dirk struggles with love and fear: ``He wanted to be strong and to love someone who was strong; he wanted to meet any gaze, to laugh under the brightest sunlight and never hide.'' After his first heartbreak, with his closest friend (who cannot accept Dirk's love nor his own for Dirk), Dirk battles more fiercely for identity; beaten up by a gang of punks, he slumps into semiconsciousness and is visited by his ancestors, each telling a haunting, lyrical tale of love, faith and self-acceptance. What might seem didactic from lesser writers becomes a gleaming gift from Block. Her extravagantly imaginative settings and finely honed perspectives remind the reader that there is magic everywhere. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
From the very first page of this intriguing novel, twelve-year-old Hero makes clear the distinction between real life and true life, the latter being the life of the imagination and the one that has the greater hold on her. A middle child in a family of child prodigies, she has not spoken for several years. She seems to live on the periphery of her family, observing but rarely participating in the daily interactions between her mother, a famous child psychologist, educator, and writer; her father, who performs the domestic duties; her older brother and sister, who have lived and suffered in the spotlight of early achievements; and a younger sister who cultivates the dictionary as a gardener does a vegetable patch. Hero has, apparently, elected to be speechless in a family of articulate geniuses as a way of establishing her own unique identity. But her "true" life revolves around the activities at a stately old house in her neighborhood. Hero has taken to scaling its garden walls by climbing some overhanging tree limbs and observing from her arboreal perch eccentric old Miss Credence feeding the birds in the garden below. The day she falls from a tree and lands at the woman's feet begins a perilous journey for the young protagonist. Miss Credence hires her to tend the garden, and as she follows Hero around at her duties, making progressively odder demands, Hero begins to realize that the woman is truly mad, but she cannot tear herself away. In the end she is drawn into a tower room where she discovers a hidden daughter that the woman has kept from the world for years. When her life becomes endangered, Hero uses her wits - and her voice - to save herself. As she did in Dangerous Spaces (Viking), Mahy explores the ways in which an interior life can take hold of a person, and the dangers that can arise when the lines between the real and the imaginary become blurred. Here again she rescues her heroine just in time, creating an exciting adventure story in the process. n.v. Martha Moore Under the Mermaid Angel Thirteen-year-old Jesse finds life pretty boring until Roxanne moves into the trailer next door. There is nothing much to do in Ida, Texas, except visit Mr. Arthur's wax museum with its two-headed chicken, a collection of baseball caps cut out of construction paper, and the main attraction, a replica of the Last Supper presided over by a mermaid angel. Jesse's mother is not thrilled about her daughter's friendship with a grown woman, particularly one who has the Liberty Bell tattooed on her chest, but Roxanne, who understands that "friendship is measured by heart-time, not clock-time," knows what really matters. Together, they watch for meteor showers. They help Mr. Arthur, who has Alzheimer's, finish cutting out his baseball caps. Roxanne even shows Jesse the human side of Franklin Harris, the biggest jerk in the eighth grade. Most important, Roxanne is the one person Jesse can talk to about her baby brother who died six years ago. The characters are a refreshing and original bunch: Debbie Bartacelli, the new girl in school, has a disfigured face and a towering intellect matched only by her cool self-assurance. Jesse's redoubtable five-year-old sister, Doris Ray, is a thorn in her side most of the time, but unhesitatingly loyal in emergencies. With its saucy first-person narrative and irresistible plot, the book will jump off the shelves. Winner of the Delacorte Press Prize for a First Young Adult Novel, it heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent. n.v. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Ice Unable to come to terms with her father's desertion, Chrissa has barely spoken to her mother, Lorraine, since she entered junior high school. In desperation, Lorraine sends her to stay with her grandmother for a year, and Chrissa doesn't argue, hoping secretly that she can coax her father's whereabouts out of Gram. Once ensconced in the dilapidated old house at the edge of the woods, however, Chrissa finds other matters coming to the fore, chief among them the hold that Sister Harmony, a faith healer, seems to have over her grandmother. The rotund, sanctimonious woman and her seedy nephew frequently enter the house unannounced and have apparently been given sizable sums of money by Gram, who can ill afford it. When Chrissa discovers that her grandmother is planning to deed her woodlands to Sister Harmony, she is even more determined to find her father. Now that she is living in his boyhood home, hints about the man she barely knew begin to mount up, though Chrissa is not always open to the evidence around her. A mild romantic interest in the boy who lives on the adjacent farm and a harrowing episode with the deranged father of two children that she is baby-sitting fill out the narrative; the latter incident offers edge-of-the-seat excitement as Chrissa musters her resources to outwit the man and rescue herself and her charges. Naylor's deft use of foreshadowing, the tension created by the imagery of ice and cold that runs like a leitmotif throughout the book, and the many fine characterizations make the book more than a one-time read. Flashbacks in which Chrissa recalls countless brief but devastating interactions with her father are clear signals to the reader, and finally to Chrissa, that her quest was really a search for herself. By the time she discovers that he is in a penitentiary, the knowledge can do her little harm. n.v. Louise Plummer The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman In her prologue, narrator and protagonist Kate Bjorkman claims, "This is one of those romance novels . . . that disgusting kind with kisses that last three paragraphs." Well - not exactly. While the chapters are interspersed with "revision notes" to give the appearance of a romance novel in progress, Kate is a much more complex heroine than those of the typical Harlequin fare, and the supporting cast of characters is more developed as well. A self-professed "amazon" at six feet tall, and nearly blind without her thick glasses, Kate is bright and literate and shares her father's passion for linguistics. The not-so-unlikely romance begins when Kate's brother comes home from college with his best friend, Richard, with whom Kate has been infatuated since childhood. Richard's beautiful, ethereal friend Fleur St. Germaine initially appears to fulfill the role of antagonist in the plot, but she soon becomes a good friend and ally to Kate. The real villain is quickly revealed to be Kate's supposed best friend, Ashley - an evil temptress and a force to be reckoned with. The heroine, of course, vanquishes her enemy in the end and wins the hero's heart, but not without experiencing some hurt. Through observations of her newlywed brother and his wife and of her parents' long-standing marriage, Kate also learns that relationships are complicated and require hard work rather than easy appeasement. Kate is the fortunate member of a creative, loving, and supportive family; the story is set over a snowy, idyllic Christmas and New Year's in Minnesota, where "Californicated" Fleur has come to witness a perfect Christmas. Plot tensions notwithstanding, Plummer's novel is filled with the "light, warm air" that spills from the Bjorkmans' home. The holiday cheer, the appealing protagonist, and the happy ending are sure to evoke the simple pleasures of popcorn and cocoa on a cold winter's day. l.a. Marsha Qualey Hometown As the Persian Gulf War looms on the horizon, sixteen-year-old Border moves from Albuquerque to his father's hometown in Minnesota, which his dad hasn't seen since he went to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Border and his free-spirited parents have moved around often, but ever since his parents' divorce, he has lived primarily with his father. His mother's career as a political activist and performance artist has caused him some personal embarrassment, and adult supervision from either parent has been rare. Border, who is a gifted musician, is used to cutting school at will and playing his recorder on street corners for money. The move to a small town where he is under the almost constant scrutiny of neighbors comes as a rude shock. Eventually, Border develops a close friendship with schoolmate Jacob and his sister. He even comes to appreciate the constant watchful maternal eye of Connie, an old family friend who lives across the street. On the other hand, Border is unnerved by the strangers who accost him in stores or in school for his father's actions during a war that seems like ancient history. Employing a casual but engaging narrative voice, Qualey creates a subtle, somewhat elusive, portrayal of her young protagonist and makes some telling comments about the disconnection of modern families who communicate largely through electronic means. In the end, small-town intimacy forces Border into a confrontation not only with his father's past but with his own present, and into the realization that he has settled in a place that, for good or ill, is his hometown, too. n.v. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A powerful story of a gay teenager troubled not so much by the fact of his sexual preference as by its loneliness. ""Dirk had known it since he could remember."" Determined not to be hurt by ""it""--he has seen sorrow in the eyes of his grandmother Fifi's friends, Martin and Merlin--he has built up a tough, cool exterior while desperately trying to conceal his passion for equally cool classmate Pup Lambert. When Pup, not quite as sure of himself, breaks off their friendship, Dirk despairingly falls into a self-destructive spiral, moshing and sneering his way through LA's club scene until he lands at last back in his bed, half-dead from a beating. There the ghosts of his great-grandmother and his parents rise up to offer their tragic, triumphant tales, and lovingly ask him to add his own chapter. Block's writing, always passionate, dazzles here--Dirk's ""love for Pup raged through him bitterly. It burned his shoulders like the sun, blistering as if it could peel off layers of skin."" The author repeats the theme common to all her books--""Any love that is love is right""--and in a lyrical final passage commends the liberating power of music, dance, and especially story. Fleshing out one (actually two, as Dirk's companion-to-be, Duck, puts in an appearance) of the colorful characters introduced in Weetzie Bat (1989), Block displays the brilliant, original vision that makes all her books unforgettable. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 8-12. "Dirk had known it since he could remember." The novel's opening sentence is the coming-out statement that enables the story of how Dirk becomes Baby Be-Bop to unfold. From his earliest awareness, Dirk had known that he didn't want to be afraid, not like so many gays he had watched. His Grandma Fifi said it was a phase, and Dirk willed her to be right--until he met and fell in love with Pup. When Pup confesses that he cannot handle his feelings for Dirk, Dirk's self-loathing is complete. He wallows further and further into self-hate. Then, in an attempt to save his life, Grandma Fifi tells him the stories of their family's love. Block captures the essence of happiness simply by describing a room or the ingredients of a sandwich. She captures the essence of love in passages of shared conversation and in her portrayal of word-filled glances and emotions. She also conveys a sense of acceptance and validation. This is her gift to young people who have known since they could remember that they too wanted--and deserved--love. Librarians who are daring--and caring--enough to include this evocative, skillfully wrought, and sometimes surrealistic novel in their YA collections will help teenagers begin their adult journey toward love and the realization that, as Dirk's great-grandmother Gazelle says, "Any love that is love is right." (Reviewed Oct. 1, 1995)0060248793Frances Bradburn