“Weetzie Bat” dealt with issues such as AIDS, premarital sex and homosexuality in a way that avoided the wholesome public service announcement style so often then seen in the genre - and it did so in what would become Block’s signature fantastical style, long before fantasy became de rigueur in YA literature. That novel is about a teen girl who finds a genie in 1980s L.A. These were dark times for Block and her family, and so when she began writing the book she set it in a city that like her surroundings had been upended.īlock has been writing magical realist fiction for teens and adults since “Weetzie Bat” was published in 1989. (One of her retinas spontaneously detached, while the other eye had developed a cataract.) To make matters worse, Block says she was in danger of going blind. At about the same time, her mother, who lived with Block and her kids and whose name was also on the title, was diagnosed with cancer. In 2010, Block, who has two school-age children, found herself financially under water on her home in Culver City. I was going through a lot of pain at that time in my life.” That’s kind of what I’m known for in my writing. She has an angular face softened by brown hair that falls in waves around her rhinestone-collared shirt. “Somebody asked me if it was cathartic to write about destroying Los Angeles,” says Block, sitting on a patio at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where some of the action in her book takes place. She was trying to metabolize and indeed survive the state she found her own life in: chaos and uncertainty. But in writing “Global Warming,” the 50-year-old Block was doing something a little more personal than merely summing up our neuroses. Our werewolves are … what again? Something. When some menacing men enter the home, Penelope escapes in their van, and her journey for survival begins.īy now, we’re all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world’s metaphors. She’s been living on her father’s hoarded supply of emergency provisions. Her home, a pink house in Venice that she hated leaving even for the hours of school and socializing, is halfway under water.

Her parents and brother are presumed dead. and who knows how much farther beyond - in ruins.

The “earth shaker” is a quake that’s left L.A.

Wasteland by francesca lia block