Customer Reviews

Quakeland

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lyrical and dreamlike, Quakeland follows the intertwined stories of a group of women, telling the story of another woman who was somehow central to all of their lives--Grace. This is Grace's story, though the events of the book more revolve around her than are about her. She is the missing piece at the story's heart, the personal tsunami that echoes the real tsunami that provides the starting point for the book.

I love Block's dream-naif prose, though I did have trouble connecting with Katrina and understanding why she was doing the things she was. I found the later narrators--the unnamed woman and Angeli--to be much more comprehensible, if only because they were watching the drama from the outside instead of directly living the story.

Overall, well worth picking up!

Quakeland by Francesca Lia Block is another example of how Block has grown creatively and how her characters have matured along with her story's themes. Here she returns to the interwoven stories that she did so beautifully in Echo. But this is not a young adult novel and this is as close as it gets to being a disappointment.

Block's young adult novels, with their beautiful imagery, lyrical language, and above all how she touches on the most painful experiences with a delicacy that makes even the most nightmarish realities something that can not only be survived but can be survived with grace. There is a promise at the end of her young adult novels that is not present in Quakeland. Perhaps this is more honest. Perhaps with maturity comes the need to just accept that pain is inevitable.

And yet, there is a sense of the human potential to evolve beyond the present reality (a promise hinted at by the perfect and marvelous illustration on the cover). This book is infused with the horrors of terrorist attacks, floods, tsunamis, and the threat of earthquakes. In the pages there is healing, a sort of homeopathic catharsis of words. I wanted to cry most of the time as I was reading. The pain was too familiar.

Needless to say, I will return to this book and reread it. I will hold it close as I read the words and sigh. Maybe I will not want to cry. Maybe I will want to cry so much more that I will not be able to stop myself. And no maybe about it, I look forward to Block's next book.

As a long-time Francesca Lia Block fan I'm pleased by how Quakeland contains the themes I've come to love so well, but is also a bit darker and has more realistic tones than her other works. Parts of it seem almost autobiographical (though I have no idea if any of it is based in reality) and that made it even more fascinating. I couldn't put it down!

the wait was worth it! francesca lia blocks books rarely come to oshawa or areas around oshawa so i finally ordered this one and a few others i was missing .. .. again, her words inspire, her stories are poetic and meaningful, they sing.

This novel contains everything I've loved about Block's work (dreamy, color-saturated prose; insider portraits of L.A.) and some qualities I didn't expect: Not only does it take a more adult approach to relationships, but it takes a turn for the meta/experimental a little over halfway through. The narrator seems to try on different voices and different ways of retelling the story of a difficult relationship. Unlike many experimental works, though, the story remains personal and emotional. It's clear that Block and/or the narrator is telling the story not to mess around with language, but to heal. The result is a beautiful and beautifully strange work, a quick read that nevertheless encompasses the reader.

I adore Francesca Lia Block. Her language is lyrical and she manages to infuse magic and possibilities into her stories regardless of their settings. Quakeland is different. The language is still gorgeous but the story is very bitter and there isn't much hope at the end. It made me wonder if FLB has had a bad experience with a man in her personal life recently. This is about the only book of hers that I don't look forward to re-reading. If this is the first book of hers that you have read, please read one of her older novels to get a better sense of her writing.

There are many likable things about this book--its prose style; its protagonist, who may be a psychic battered by the world or who may just be mentally ill; an antagonist whose narcissism belies his search for enlightenment; and the loving and painful and sometimes shallow and fearful nature of friendships. But this reader experienced great frustration at the sudden, confusing and unexplained changes of voice in the last section of the novel. Just at the moment when our protagonist should be processing the magnitude of her loss and the depths of her self destructive relationships, she's dumped from the story and fragmented into other viewpoints. The novel collapses into an annoying, confusing and deeply unsatisfying self indulgence on the part of the author.