Block is one of my favorites for off beat but surprisingly soulful tales. I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into in this one before I even noticed the handwritten notes about the book someone so kindly left on the inside cover.
Barbie is the daughter of a former beauty queen who is determined to “give her everything I never got”. It’s a common enough tale to come up with “beauty queen” and a definite theme in the current popularity of shows like Toddlers and Tiaras.
So, without much difficulty we learn that her mom is pretty emotionally abusive to almost everyone around her and horribly manipulative of Barbie’s child-like need to to make her
mother happy. That doesn’t make it any less painful. Especially when it comes to a very short, throw away passage where Barbie’s father abandons her as well, rather than trying to help her.
As a child Barbie makes friends with Mab, a sassy little fairy who might or might not be imaginary. Barbie also suffers at the hands of a famous child photographer who later becomes famous for other terrible things. (And we, the reader, get to painfully see her mother knowingly, and happily sell her own daughter out for fame.)
Skipping forward to her teens, Mab is still around and Barbie finds herself increasingly confronted with a need to break free of her mother’s control and the life she’s stuck in. But changing habits is not an easy thing. Even harder is breaking out of the systematic morphing of ones self worth by the people we’re all predisposed to love and admire.
I Was a Teenage Fairy is a terrible book. Terrible like a beautifully stitched velvet glove covered fist of broken glass that caresses the reader for a flicker before smashing them into bloody tears. You want real gut-wrenching horror? Leave vampires and ghouls aside and read this one.