ABSTRACT
Looking at, handling and reading the early 1990s paperback editions of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat novels is suggestive of the ‘young adult’ publishing strategy of that period. They are insubstantial and lightweight.1 Of course, I’m describing physical characteristics but these are commonly elided with ‘accessibility’. This is ‘easy reading’ for young people seen as unlikely to pick up and stay with ‘thicker’ books. Amidst the proliferation of both older visual and new media, reading is often seen as embattled. A consequent decline in habits of attention, concentration, reflection, thought and imagination are together taken to constitute a kind of cognitive erosion. Though such anxieties about declining print literacy are usually invoked in relation to boys, these titles – Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan and Baby Bebop – seemingly address young teenage girls. These are not ‘tough’ books explicitly challenging readers to prove they can take ‘it’ – realism, violence, death, conflict (though these figure in all of them). To the contrary, they are ‘fantasy’, and with their highly stylised cover art, are thus implicitly ‘girly’ books.
