pantryslut

I've been reading Michelle Tea's The Girl at the Bottom of the Sea, with intent of reading it aloud to my children sometime soon. I don't like it as much as I liked the first book; Syrena the gruff mermaid, who was so wonderful the first time around, can get a little one-note here. And also I had a delayed bad-but-quirky-and-personal reaction to a minor plot point in the first book that is referenced early in the second. But I am still enjoying myself.

Meanwhile, I read the first of Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books to the kids, which they enjoyed. I know, not entirely age-appropriate, perhaps. It was fine. But man I had forgotten how twee those books really are. On second thought, maybe they are rather age-appropriate after all. We've moved on to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, in which I had to explain right off the bat that I had had pneumonia once and survived just fine, and April had even had febrile hallucinations once and survived just fine too, so maybe we could read the rest of the book without panicking about Timothy. Considering that this is a talking-animal book, after all, it's so far pleasantly un-twee and quite nicely written. Apparently I'd forgotten that, too.