I Was a Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block

Mab is a comfort to Barbie, a bit of magic in her world of domineering mothers and pedophile photographers.Īt 16, Barbie is established as a teen model, still accompanied by Mab. (Yes, she's named for the doll.) She encounters Mab when she is 11, a sassy smart-mouthed girl with wings no bigger than her pinky.

Her most recent effort, I Was a Teenage Fairy, follows in a similar vein but is grounded more in a semblance of reality, although the larger-than-life aspects are still present.īarbie Marks, daughter of a former beauty queen whose career never took off, is living out her mother's dreams. Four more novels with the same characters followed. (Oct.Francesca Lia Block, I Was a Teenage Fairyįrancesca Lia Block established herself as a writer with a difference 10 years ago with the publication of her slim young adult novel Weetzie Bat, a book set in a kind of fairy-tale version of Los Angeles. This fairy tale is too pointedly a social critique to be entirely magical, but its spell feels real. The prose, less obviously lush than in previous books, sustains steady crescendos of insight. Elsewhere, however, the writing is among Block's supplest. Barbie finally overcomes her psychic wounds by unmasking the predatory photographer in this section, Block compares Barbie and Mab to comic book superheroes, and in fact, they behave with an exaggerated flatness, as if the author were squeezing them into a happy ending one or two sizes too small. Here the characters and settings will be familiar to the author's fans: a glamorous would-be boyfriend with a profoundly sympathetic gay best friend impossibly hip restaurants and clubs a house converted from a legendary Hollywood hotel.

The novel jumps ahead five years, when Barbie has a flourishing career as a model but is stunted emotionally and artistically (she wants to be a photographer but can't summon the creative energy).

Maybe later on she was the sex.'' In any event, Mab's friendship sustains Barbie after she is molested by a prominent photographer, a violation her mother aggravates by turning her head the other way. At about the same time that her ex-beauty queen mom pushes her into modeling, 11-year-old Barbie-named after the doll-meets Mab, an acid-tongued, winged beauty: ''a teenage girl-thing who was the size of most teenage girls' littlest fingers.'' Block proposes different ways to understand Mab: ''Maybe Mab was real. This disarming new book by the ever-inventive Block (the Weetzie Bat books) seems at once more fantastic and more of a YA ''problem novel'' than her previous titles.

I Was a Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block