From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 11:40:20 -0700

Karen,

Well, I don't know who the other critics are onlist, but I can answer for me. You asked, where exactly do I live? I'm not sure if I am being challenged for my street cred... or what the best response is if so... but I do think you misunderstand my post. Maybe answering your question will clarify.

I live now in Northern California, about twelve hours north of Los Angeles. My town is what I suppose you would call a progressive rural community, with significant influences from a state university, logging and fishing industries, and tribal communities. Over the years, I have lived in Seattle, Eugene, San Francisco, Oakland and an affluent suburb in mid-Michigan. I have lived across the street from a crack house (SF) and joined Castro's Gay Pride in all its glory; I have worked at the Red
& Black (Seattle); I have worked and lived and been friends with people of nearly every sexual orientation and intention. I have been half-smothered by the attempts of roommates to make butter from marijuana, been to two Rave parties. (Two were enough.) I have studied child psychopathology, sexual abuse, radical feminism and gender relations. AIDS has been a reality for all the years of my adulthood, along with abortion, date-rape, and the other "facts" of my generation's time. I am not ignorant of the dynamics present in Block's books. And for that matter, I have extended family who live in Los Angeles, and family who worked in the movie biz there and in Seattle.

It's not that I think that the characters in Block's novels have weird problems. I think that Block's treatment of their lives is weird. Other authors tackle these topics, and for some, when you reach the end of their novels, you've grown. You've seen that the world is a wider place, that it isn't all chaos and disturbed psyches. You -- along with the characters -- have developed some sense of proportion. You've realized that you don't have to be psychotic to be interesting. You've remembered that life is full of things that have nothing to do with humanity, and you've pulled strength from that. You've learned more ways to be strong, not patterns for downward depressive spirals.

Why Block made me so angry is that in the three books I read, she took real issues, elements that kids will gravitate to and need answers for, and glossed them across her stories like lipstick. So Witch Baby is crazed by the world. It's probably just her eyes, her lineage -- not something we each and all could actually do something about, right? And folks should all feel badly about what happened (happens) to Indian tribal communities, so let's name our baby Cherokee. That'll right the balance.

Who /thinks/ like that? Some teens do. Some adults do. It is self-reflective, self?sorbed. Like the books. They /seem/ to be about bigger things, broader things... but I couldn't find anything in them that shows anything about how folks actually live in a healthy way with the wild dynamics of culture and self. They remind me of the part in Peter Dickinson's /Eva/, where folks just started walking into the sea. And sad as it was, what else were you supposed to do? These books felt like that moment to me: utterly narcissistic, and ultimately obliterating.

Maia

Karen Cruze wrote:
Received on Wed 08 Jun 2005 01:40:20 PM CDT