Francesca Lia Block

I'll be inside the one who holds you.
And then I won't be.

I just finished reading a great Young Adult novel by Francesca Lia Block called Wasteland - I highly recommend it, or anything else she's written. Block has such a poetic way of writing, and she really gets inside the skin of her troubled, alienated teenage characters. I've read several of her books, and there is always something there that I can resonate with - in this novel it is the suicide of someone you love and with whom you have too intense a relationship. Given the kind of themes she deals with, and the frank way she depicts difficult teenage situations, her work must be controversial; but how I wish there had been books like hers around when I was growing up.

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew...

a.