From Amazon.com
Part myth, part dream, and all enchantment, Francesca Lia Block has blessed her glitter fans with another darkly fantastical tale of Los Angeles, "a city of magicians, movie queens, love-struck clowns." On this particular magic carpet ride, Block follows the sad footsteps of Echo, a Hollywood baby born of a dark-souled artist father and an effervescent mother whose impossible beauty likens her to an angel. Echo, who believes that "the only things I know how to do well are shoplift, kiss and dance," feels excluded from her extraordinary parents' perfect love for each other. So she sets out alone to try and fill the cavernous void inside. During her travels, Echo meets a broken angel, iron-pumping vampires, and the fairy daughter of a rock star. Are these figures real? Echo believes in them, and so will the reader, as Block's melodious prose leaves no choice but to accept them as true. Echo finally finds her own true "love-boy" when she learns to look for love within instead of searching for validation through her drugs of choice: food, sex, or doomed relationships. Told in a myriad of voices that belong to Echo, her parents, lovers, and friends, these interconnected short stories are a visual feast of intoxicatingly hip images where the city of Los Angeles is as much a character as the outrageous people that populate its movie-star mansions. Echo's story of salvation will appeal not only to eyeliner-wearing club kids, but to any older teen who's ever felt insecure and lonely in a world full of kissing couples and Hallmark holidays. (Ages 13 and older)
--Jennifer Hubert
From Publishers Weekly
Block (The Rose and the Beast) moves to a new level of complexity without sacrificing accessibility for this exquisitely wrought coming-of-age story. The subjects, settings and semi-magical tone will be familiar to Block's readers as Echo, an artistic L.A. teenager, overcomes various forms of rejection in her search for selfhood and true love. Echo lives among angels, false and true, mythic and real, among them Echo's mother, whom Echo thinks is perfect but who appears blind or impervious to her daughter's needs; a famous-artist father whose love for his wife seems to leave no room for Echo; girls Echo wishes she could be; and a nameless, wounded boy who saves Echo from drowning and whose memory sustains Echo as she meets men incapable of loving her. As in previous works, death hangs heavily over the heroine: parents die young, vampires prey on the innocent, children fight terrible disease. Block's structure and imagery, however, manifest a new sophistication and subtlety, as passages and metaphors "echo" one another throughout. She delicately shifts the narrative to show different partners (the heroine's grandparents; the lovers of Echo's friends; a sibling pair) facing similar conflicts, but she quietly varies the individuals' responses. Lyrical passages, such as Echo's descriptions of her mother's extraordinary beauty ("She is like the da Vinci Madonna with a crescent moon hung on her mouth") ripple beneath Echo's life-and-death struggles. This begs not just to be read, but to be reread, and savored. All ages.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
de Block
de Francesca Lia Block
