This canny introduction to Weetzie is the perfect prep for younger readers to get to know someone they can grow with.For the past twenty years, Weetzie Bat has been an icon for outcasts who choose to see the world through rose-colored glasses (preferably cat-eyed and pink).
Weetzie has two mysteries to solve: first, who is the beautiful boy who shows up out of nowhere whenever she needs him, and second, who keeps sending her cryptic riddles that introduce her to intriguing places in her city? As she follows the scavenger hunt of the messages and gets to know her guardian angel and his sinister, voodoo-practicing sister (whose name and practices hint that she may become Vixanne Wigg, Weetzie's nemesis), Weetzie begins a self-aware transformation from sad, neglected tween to self-sufficient caregiver, who intentionally replaces despair with pistachio-and-cherry ice cream, fills her mother's empty liquor bottles with stolen flowers, and learns "how to forget the things that make sad." The prose both charts and matches Weetzie's transformation from ordinary girl into someone who deliberately creates the world she wants to live in as she changes, so does the language, from a straightforward reporting of events to the more dreamlike, haunting quality of Block's signature style. When her beloved father leaves and her mother slips into an alcoholic haze, she flounders in her sadness until she befriends two equally beleaguered classmates, who bond with her over their outcast status. Louise Bat is a skinny, awkward seventh-grader saddened by the fights between her alcoholic mother and drug-addicted father. Now the question of who Weetzie Bat was before she appeared decked out in feathers and glitter and swimming in her love current is answered, and in a rather surprising way.
It's been over twenty years since YA lit's most notable Manic Pixie Dream Girl introduced readers to her slinkster-cool world of Shangri-L.A.
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