Blood Roses
3.5/5
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About this ebook
What shall we do, all of us?
All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?
What's real is what's imagined in nine tales of transformation by Francesca Lia Block.
Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award, is the author of many acclaimed and bestselling books, including Weetzie Bat; the book collections Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books and Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales, and Secrets; the illustrated novella House of Dolls; the vampire romance novel Pretty Dead; and the gothic werewolf novel The Frenzy. Her work is published around the world.
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Reviews for Blood Roses
68 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very short stories about youth, romance, depression - mingling magic and dreams and reality. Written like poetry. Sad and beautiful.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Well, it may just be that this book totally wasn't my thing, but I thought it kind of sucked. I mean maybe it has potential if you look at it as solely a work of art or whatever, but meh. For what it's worth, I am not one of those people that is into poetry. But I think those who are might look at this book more favorably than I did, even though it's not really poetry.
This is the first thing I've ever read by this author, and judging from some of the other reviews it is different from her other work. So I will give her one more chance in the future, but so far this hasn't been a good experience.
This book was basically a collection of slightly related short stories. But the writing just seemed to be really poor. I felt like I was reading a young child's poorly written, disjointed, ADHD English project, to be honest. Every story left me wishing I hadn't wasted time reading it, and glad it wasn't that much time that was wasted. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I really liked the concept in this collection of short stories.Some were weird, some were good, and some where okay.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a book of slightly interconnected short stories that are all based in Block’s trademark magical realism. It is our world, only there is more to see than meets the eye. Some of the stories have to do with a group of friends, one story focuses on each one. While the stories are definitely very Block, I don’t think they are unusual enough to earn a Printz, but this is the first actual Printz book I’ve read, so I may change my mind later. This is for older teens – much of the magic covers up sex, drugs, and things that younger teens may not want to read. But Block does a good job of leaving things vague enough that most readers will be able to read whatever they want into it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book held nine short little stories about love, suicide, and depression mixed with the supernatural. It held the same tempo as all of Block's books and it read fast like most of hers do.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I adore Block's work. Although it sometimes seems very abstract, the imagery and flow of her words is absolutely gorgeous. My favorite story in this particular book was Skin Art.That said, I wouldn't recommend this to people who weren't fans of Block already. In some ways, it's more difficult to read (although shorter) than her other works.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Block's short story collection paints portraits of troubled teens: girls worshipping a recently-suicided rockstar, a girl in love with a too-old tattoo artist, a boy whose father and girlfriend both have died and has decided to live underground. But Block puts a twist on these stories by adding fantastical elements. In My Boyfriend is an Alien, a girl recounts all the evidence she has seen that he is not from here - his accent, his giant round eyes, the way he says "your" instead of "our" when speaking about the government. In My Haunted House, a child deals with the realization that her doll house is haunted by death and is distraught that no one could possibly believe her. A series of four stories are intertwined, each of the characters unaware of the troubles the others are facing: a desperate sadness that causes Rachel to grow to ungodly proportions, falling in love with someone from the wrong side of the tracks, tattoos appearing all over the body without an artist in sight, a vampiric mother. Most touching is the story of Lincoln and Audrey, the boy with wings and the girl who found him with these wings torn off and kept him safe while he healed. These stories are sexy and frank. The truth in Block's writing sings over the elements of fantasy that serve as a platform for the anguish that is adolescence. This book is cathartic, passionate, and lovely.
Book preview
Blood Roses - Francesca Lia Block
Blood Roses
Every day, Lucy and Rosie searched for the blood roses in their canyon. They found eucalyptus and poison oak, evening primrose and oleander but never the glow-in-the-dark red, smoke-scented flowers with sharp thorns that traced poetry onto your flesh.
You only see them if you die,
Lucy said, but Rosie just smiled so that the small row of pearls in her mouth showed.
Still, the hairs stood up on both their forearms and napes that evening, turning them to furry faunesses for a moment as they sat watching the sunset from their secret grotto in the heart of the canyon. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and decaying leaves. The sky was streaked with smog and you could hear the sound of cars and one siren but that world felt very far away.
Here, the girls turned doll-size, wove nests out of twigs to sleep in the eucalyptus branches, collected morning dew in leaves and dined on dark purple berries that stained their mouths and hands.
We’d better get home,
Lucy said, brushing the dirt off her jeans.
They would have stayed here all night in spite of the dangers—snakes, coyote, rapists, goblins. It was better than the apartment made of tears where their mother had taken them when she left their father.
Their mother said their father was an alcoholic and a sex addict but all Lucy remembered was the sandpaper roughness of his chin, like the father in her baby book Pat the Bunny, when he hugged her and Rosie in his arms at the same time. He had hair of blackbird feathers and his eyes were green semiprecious stones.
Lucy and Rosie loved Emerson Solo because like their father he was beautiful, dangerous and unattainable. Especially now. Emerson Solo, twenty-seven, had stabbed himself to death in the heart last month.
You really had to want to die to be successful at that, their mother said before she confiscated all their Solo CDs and posters. Lucy understood why she’d done it. But still she wanted to look at his face and hear his voice again. For some reason he comforted her, even now. Was it because he had escaped?
Lucy and Rosie were in the music store looking through the Emerson Solo discs. There was the one with the black bird on the cover called For Sorrow and the one called The White Room. There was a rumor that the white room was supposed to be death. The store was all out of Collected with the photo of Emerson Solo holding a bouquet of wildflowers with their dirty roots dragging down out of his hands.
A man was standing across the aisle from them and when Lucy looked up he smiled. He was young and handsome with fair hair, a strong chin.
You like him?
he asked.
Rosie said, Oh, yes! Our mom threw out all his CDs. We just come and look at him.
The man smiled. The light was hitting his thick glasses in such a way that Lucy couldn’t see his eyes. Dust motes sizzled in a beam of sunlight from the window. Some music was playing, loud and anxious-sounding. Lucy didn’t recognize it.
My uncle’s a photographer. He has some photos he took of him a week before he killed himself.
Lucy felt her sinuses prickling with tears the way they did when she told Rosie scary stories. Her mouth felt dry.
You can come see if you want,
he said. He handed Lucy a card.
She put it in her pocket and crumpled it up there, so he couldn’t see.
One of Emerson Solo’s CDs was called Imago. The title song was about a phantom limb.
She wondered if when you died it was like that. If you still believed your body was there and couldn’t quite accept that it was gone. Or if someone you loved died, someone you were really close to, would they be like a phantom limb, still attached to