Francesca Lia Block's The Rose and The Beast

Since publishing the classic Weetzie Bat in 1989, Francesca Lia Block has become one of the most widely read Young Adult authors around. Her appeal among the pre-teen and teen reading population stems largely from her ability to infuse a sense of magic and wonder into even the most grim and realistic of situations and settings. And, this is no small feat, considering her most beloved setting of all happens to be the city that, for many, only brings to mind images of a sprawling landscape of skyscrapers, smog and crime: Los Angeles.

Under Block's gaze and through her pen, however, Los Angeles becomes, again, the land of angels and dreams, where one feels that beauty and magic are still possible if one just knows how and where to look. What a treat it is, then, to have a magician of Block's breathtaking skill turn her attention to the familiar fairy tales of childhood in The Rose and The Beast: Fairy Tales Retold. In Block's revisioned tales, which include new renditions of the classic Snow White, Cinderella, Thumbelina, and Beauty and the Beast stories, latent themes emerge while modernized insertions and intricate, sensual details thrust you into a world where the grit of modern life is able to exist side by side with the fragile stuff of fairy tale and make believe.

Block makes an art of creating the most lavish images with the simplest combinations of words and sentences. While the prose may seem simple, and it is easy to assume that this makes the literature most suitable for younger readers, the ideas that are so lovingly threaded through Block’s words are neither immature or watered down. Yes, Block’s themes and subject matter are often veiled by such a magnificence of words that sometimes one does not notice the sexual undertones or the explicit nature of what Block is describing until it leaps out at the end of a paragraph or page, or hours after you’ve finished the story. And, there is gravity to be found in each of the nine tales found in this slight (at 229 large-print pages) book.

Block has successfully attempted to make fairy tales for the modern world, able to be believed, even if just for a moment, by the modern reader. Pioneering the revolution in Young Adult literature in portraying the real issues and dilemmas that America’s youth are facing, Block creates tales that do not ignore the stories of abandonment, violence, exploitation and violation that are the experience of so many of the young adults that the older generations would like to still consider innocents. So, while Block’s book pays homage to the imagined world of childhood innocence, she also uses her revisionings as therapeutic reminders that innocence has never existed without experience and that true magic lies in exploring, as William Blake once did, the ways in which these forces rub up against each other to create the wondrous spark that is life.