Baby Be-Bop is the last novelette in the Weetzie series included in the Dangerous Angels collection. Sadly, it’s also the weakest.
Baby Be-Bop tells Dirk’s story. Cherokee’s maybe-dad and Weetzie best friend he’s the reason these books are often challenged or banned in school libraries, because he’s gay. On one hand I can see Baby Be-Bop being Block’s reaction to those banning calls.
Dirk’s story is as vivid and poetic as the other stories (and more fantastic). But halfway through the tale Dirk is beat, nearly to death, for being gay, and the rest of the book is possibly hallucinations he has of his dead family members. Any one of them could be a beautiful story on their own (even Dirk’s father’s story, which in the end is disappointing because his father and mother just “lost interest” in living, despite Dirk being a young boy who needed parents). But inserted into the style and pacing readers come to expect from the Weetzie stories it leads to a screeching halt of the already minimal action for overwhelming dreaminess.
The theme is that everyone has a story to live, but this book gets so caught up in the storytelling that it wanders severely off into wishy-washy-ness. It would have been better earlier in the series, rather than after Missing Angel Juan, so readers might want to consider reading it before they read Witch Baby.
Of course it is a challenge to write a book about a character who has already grown and found happiness in previous books. Prequels are always a challenge since you know how things turn out. So in the end I was excited to read a story focusing on Dirk, but dismayed that it veered into dreaminess and message instead of continuing to tell Dirk’s story.