Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Waters & The Wild ~ Francesca Lia Block review

The Waters and The Wild
HarperTeen
June 2, 2009
128 pages
Amazon


Thirteen-year-old Bee is almost a normal teenage girl...except that she feels a strange connection with the earth and dreams of eating handfuls of the dirt in her garden. So normal, but not quite, as the book jacket says:

I am a thirteen-year-old double Gemini. I get bad grades, write poetry with my left hand, dance in my room, surf the net. I Google images of the tattoos my mom won't let me get. . . .

But my world belongs to someone else. Someone who lives below the concrete of Los Angeles, someone with wild eyes and twigs in her hair.

And I think she wants her life back.


A she that looks like Bee's double and appears momentarily and states, "You are me," before disappearing leaving Bee to wonder and search.

The Waters and The Wild is a tale of doppelgangers, past lives, possible abductions, other mystical things and much, much more. Told in a very short, little book, it nevertheless gets in your head and connects you with the characters.

The best I can think to compare both the style of The Waters and its length is to skipping a stone across the water. The stone only hit a few places as it goes along, but that doesn't take any of the beauty away from the lake and it still gets to the end (if you do it well). And there's still a great deal of beauty in this story (and it's done very well).

Hope that made sense :)

In fact, for an only 128 page book, I liked one of the minor characters so much that I really wished that there was going to someday be more of her story.


The W.B. Yeats poem that the title of the book is inspired by, should be below via Google Books preview...




10/10

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