Product Description

This is the story of two girls, racing through space like shadow and light. A photo negative, together they make the perfect image of a girl. Violet is the dark one, dressed in forever black, dreaming Technicolor dreams of spinning the world into her very own silver screen creation. Claire is like a real-life Tinker Bell, radiating love and light, dressing herself in wings of gauze and glitter, writing poems to keep away the darkness. The setting is L.A., a city as beautiful as it is dangerous, and within this landscape of beauty and pain Violet and Claire vow to make their own movie. Together they will show the world the way they want it to be, and maybe then the world will become that place--a place where people no longer hate or fight or want to hurt. But when desire and ambition threaten to rip a seamless friendship apart, only one thing can make two halves whole again--the power of love.

Francesca Lia Block's latest novel is a beautifully told story that boldly combines the world of film with the lyrical graceful language of poetry. The voices of two friends--one dark, one light--combine to tell a larger tale of love and loss, and the strength that comes from believing in dreams.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #702994 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .53" h x 4.99" w x 7.01" l, .39 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Amazon.com
Francesca Lia Block has gained a tremendous following writing stories about the young denizens of Los Angeles that are simultaneously ethereal and utterly tangible. Titles such as The Hanged Man, Dangerous Angels, Girl Goddess #9, and I Was a Teenage Fairy explore the heaviest issues facing teens--including all variety of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll--with the light touch of skillful poet. In Violet and Claire, Block once again exposes us to both the best and the worst of the City of Angels, as we trace the rise and fall of a female friendship from thrilling expectations to soul-squelching excess.

Set against the glittering background of Hollywood, Block's work has long been marked by an intensely visual style, so it is perhaps appropriate that this story opens like a screenplay: "FADE IN: The helicopter circles, whirring in a sky the color of laundered-to-the-perfect-fade-jeans. Clouds like the wigs of starlets--fluffy platinum spun floss." The script theme continues with chapter subheadings such as "EXT: HIGH SCHOOL QUAD--DAY" and "INT: LIMO--NIGHT" while teenage wannabe filmmaker Violet and gossamer-winged poet Claire take turns telling their story. Everywhere Violet is dark, Claire resonates light. And as they make the arduous journey toward adulthood by way of the silver screen dream, it is this essential oppositeness that both draws the two together and drives them apart. Luckily, there's a Hollywood ending for the yin-yang duo, "the photo negative of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl." (Ages 12 and older) --Brangien Davis

From Publishers Weekly
Block (the Weetzie Bat novels) sets herself new challenges and meets them with consummate grace in this resonant novel. Violet and Claire, best friends, are polar opposites: Violet is angry and intense, with a fierce ambition to write and direct films; Claire is passive, attempting poetic transcendence of the casual cruelties of everyday life. Each girl gets what she thinks she wants. Violet, still in high school, lands a six-figure film deal, and Claire begins a romance with her poetry teacher. But these fulfilled dreams sour, and Violet and Claire become painfully estranged. In a triumphant finale, they embrace, aware that their relationship restores the balance missing in their separate personalities. The elements of the storyAfairies, overnight fame, arts, sex and drugs, glamorous parties and, of course, the heady Los Angeles settingAare classic Block; the combination, however, is fresh and arresting, and her fans will applaud it. The narrative line is more pronounced than in previous works and, in another departure, provides a clear division between the fantastic and the real. The fairies, for example, belong to Claire's fantasy history of a lost race of "faeries" ("The patriarchy turned them into little insects," she explains to Violet). Cynical Violet and dreamy Claire alternate as narrators, projecting distinct voices that gradually come to resemble each other. Shedding a transformative light onto the often complex, sometimes dark nature of close friendships, Block's writing is as lush and luminous, as hip and wise as ever. Ages 10-up. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up-Behind the glossy hipness and lush sensory detail that characterize Block's fiction, her fans will find here the sad story of the friendship between two teens. Violet remembers the tough, excited kid she was in sixth grade, the one who wanted to be president, and the one who entered junior high, became Vile, and wanted to die. Her love for movies and her passion to write screenplays save her and connect her to Claire, an ethereal poet with gauze wings sewn on the back of her shirt. They become instant friends, but the outside world intrudes. Violet is bedded by a rock star, who sends her on to a job as a girl Friday for a screen agent, who gives her the impetus to write an enormously successful screenplay, which propels her into a sickening, drug-filled world. Meanwhile, Claire enrolls in a poetry-writing class and becomes attached to the instructor, deeply disturbing Violet, who resents the loss of her friend's attention. Up to this point in the plot, the story is told in alternating sections of first-person narration. The climax and denouement, however, are even more consciously movielike, shifting to third person and focusing on the externals of the scenes in which Claire and Violet separately attend and flee a wild party, heading for the desert where they come together in the end. The sex and violence are explicit; the colors, odors, and tastes of Claire and Violet's Los Angeles world are even more distinctly described. Block's style is still light and frothy here, but there is substance within.
Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.