Barbie’s mother used to be a beauty queen, but never made a successful career out of being a model. It is her dream for Barbie to achieve all she couldn’t, and so she drags the little girl to agency after agency, trying to persuade them to take her on. Barbie doesn’t want to be a model, she’s frightened of standing in front of the camera lens, and is more interested in the tiny fairy girl she found one day in her garden, who calls herself Mab. Eventually Barbie’s mother finds a photographer willing to photograph her, Hamilton Waverley, but he has a darker agenda.
Five years later, Barbie is a teenager haunted by what Hamilton Waverley did to her. Her mother spends all day in front of the television drinking, and Barbie sneaks out at night to go to parties. But one night Mab comes along with her, and everything starts to change when Barbie meets Griffin, another model who began working as a child, and Todd, an successful actor.
I have mixed feelings about Francesca Lia Block’s work. The writing is beautiful and there are passages in every book that I want to copy out and stick inside my wardrobe so that I can read them every day, but sometimes the description drowns out what’s actually going on and I find her plots to be too weakly present for me to really be able to get on with them. With some of the stories, like Echo
I Was a Teenage Fairy, in my opinion, doesn’t have most of these flaws. The plot is tight and the passages that are just description break it up nicely and add to the atmosphere. Mab is the most memorable character, a beautiful fairy who isn’t very nice. She finds Barbie’s inaction frustrating and hates her mother. She’s also obsessed with men! Barbie is an introvert forced into the spotlight, brought up in a different family, she would spend most of her time reading, studying and thinking. I would have liked to know more about them, but I found them believable and interesting.
Barbie, named after the doll, is a model who wishes she could be on the other side of the camera. She doesn’t find herself beautiful, but other people clearly do. Her mother starts putting her on diets at age eleven, and buys her a Barbie doll for every birthday, wishing that her daughter would look like that. The book is set in Hollywood, and all of Barbie’s friends and acquaintances of the same age are models or actors. Barbie’s body image issues are never directly addressed, but she stops worrying about them as she gains the confidence to be herself and stop doing what her mother wants her to do.
If you haven’t read Francesca Lia Block before, I Was A Teenage Fairy is a good place to start. Fans often recommend you start with Block’s first novella, Weetzie Bat, which is what I did, but I wasn’t sure I liked it until the second read and it didn’t really make sense until I read the other books in the Dangerous Angels
, although it is fairly complex with sub-plots and a wide variety of characters. I thought the characterisation was great and the plot was really well done. I could relate to Virginia’s social anxiety, especially the hiding in the loos part, I used to do the same thing when I didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch or was just feeling especially anxious around people. I thought it was interesting to see a teenage character stand up to parents who don’t appreciate or believe in her. I’d have liked a little more of Froggy – but it’s good that the love interest didn’t take centre stage in Virginia’s mind. She seemed to be most influenced by the opinions of her parents and the popular Bri-girls.
, and there is a cameo appearance of two characters from that book in The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Carolyn Mackler’s novels. I don’t know whether the author names them herself or whether the titles are chosen by an editor, but they’re all really eye catching!