Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartbreaking and magically beautiful., December 11, 1998
"The Hanged Man" is somewhat of a loner in Francesca Lia Block's bibliography. It's not connected to her most famous series, the Weetzie Bat books, by anything other than location. The protagonist is Laurel, a seventeen-year-old girl whose father has just died. She flirts with death and anorexia in the dark magic of the LA that is her world, of devils and flowers, voodoo and fairies. When I first read this book, it made me cry-- somthing very few books have done. Block's writing is a very true approximation of a sensitive yet jaded teenager trying to come to grips with her life. The descriptions in the book are amazing-- one that stands out is this one, describing the voice of a man Laurel meets in the hospital where her father is dying. "His voice cracked the way ice does when you pour liquor over it." Your heart cracks, too.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A truly magical and complex book, October 25, 1999
By A Customer
This is the first book I read of Francesca Lia Block's, and after having read all of them thus far, this still stands out in my head and the most powerful and deeply-moving one of all. Block transports us into Laurel's world with the same amount of confusion, frustration, passion, and bottled up emotions. Her beautifullt lyrical prose lets you escape up into the hills with the freaks, and the animals, and the sparks of fireworks, and popping bubbles. It is so grounded in the harsh reality of drugs, abuse, eating disorders, death, and relationships, but the writing has a magical feeling to it, YOU WILL feel different after reading it.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, amazing, inspiring, September 19, 2000
Francesca Lia Block writes half in poetry, half in prose. This story incorporates the Tarot deck into a girl's life, a girl who is searching, like many of her characters, for her sense of self. Rather than having never had it in the first place, Laurel lost it when she was young, having been traumatized. The way this story unfolds little bits of Laurel's life, showing her past and finally building up to a point where it cannot stay hidden any more, is done masterfully. The quote used on the outside, when Laurel is rationalizing her anorexia, "I will be thin and pure like spun glass . . ." or something similar to that, is one of the most haunting and evocative quotes I have ever read. I found this book very inspiring, not as someone who had a traumatized childhood (I didn't, not like this) but as a reader who has found the magic and poetry of the nineties and "pop" modern culture in the writings of an author, finally.
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