VIOLET AND CLAIRE

PLB 0-06-027750-5 In a Neverland-yet-here-and-now Los Angeles, Block (I Was a Teenage Fairy, 1998, etc.) first presents Violet, who is 17, and who has already endured her Goth phase; she’s also been depressed and a cutter of her own flesh. Violet has a vision, though, for she loves movies and studies them obsessively; she writes her screenplay fanatically, while seeing the world with clarity—it unspools as if on film. When she meets the vulnerable Claire, whose is as fey and fragile as her Tinker Bell T-shirt wings, their friendship heals the broken places in each other. Set-pieces abound, but they are presented exquisitely: Violet has an erotic (but safe-sex) encounter with a famed rock star; Claire attends a poetry workshop; a wild LA party follows Violet’s screenwriting success; both girls find the metaphors of the shooting star and the Joshua tree in the desert. Fans of the author’s previous works will take to this one; newcomers will be captured by the rainbow iridescence of Block’s prose and her hallucinatory descriptions of the darkest of teen angst and shiniest of Hollywood glitz. (Fiction. 13+)