![]() ![]() Atmosphere is built at the expense of momentum, and the collection as a whole, while still superior to most YA writing, doesn't achieve the heights of the author's best fiction. The roses, camellias and jacarandas of Block's lush prose style scent these works with a heady perfume the disadvantage here has to do with her manipulation of the short story genre. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets. You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. Throughout, eros and love receive modulated but frank tribute. When you were a baby I sat very still to hold you. In one of the most ambitious entries, ""Dragons in Manhattan,"" a girl with two mothers decides to find her father and, after traveling from New York to California, learns that one of the ""mothers"" is in fact her father, a transsexual. Here, as in her previous work, the author sets about deflating the oppositions that most people either reinforce or invent in order to distance themselves from others: carefree child/knowing adult straight/gay black/white male/female. Writing with the same sense of wonder that gives such magic to Weetzie Bat and her other novels, Block turns out nine short stories that share a similar theme. ![]()
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