Francesca Lia Block picks precisely the right title for this novel about that awkward push me-pull you phase of adolescence. Thirteen-year-old Louise, who narrates, wants to be called Weetzie, the nickname her father, Charlie, uses for her. But she must earn it, and the rite of passage is painful.
Weetzie Bat took the teen scene by storm at its publication in 1989. Not just because it hit on still-taboo topics such as drugs, homosexuality and teens living on their own, but because Block reinvented magical realism for the audience who lived life as if they were Gabriel García Márquez characters. Block wrote about Weetzie, Dirk, Duck and her Secret Agent Lover Man from a slight remove, allowing us to watch them starry-eyed in all their glitter. This book thrusts us into Louise's psyche, exposing her as she lives through the pimply stage. We see her refashioning castoff clothes and roller skating down Venice Beach--glimmers of a Weetzie future--but she's also the victim of the mean girls' slam book and is banished to the outcast table in the cafeteria. "Junior high was like the bad kind of Wonderland in Alice where people are mean and crazy, everything is backward, and you're growing (hips) and shrinking (self-esteem) all the time," she thinks. Louise witnesses the fight that sends Charlie off in his yellow Thunderbird and the "wonder boy" rescuing her mother Brandy-Lynn from drowning.
Teens may miss references to Patti Smith and assume Louise is watching Happy Days in reruns, but they will relate to the heroine's universal feelings of being on the fringe. Louise's uplifting example proves that only from the outside can one forge her own true path. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness