She'd stood there for years, brushing the can with the brush. Each story in Birds of America is a self-contained, brief journey into someone else's world, usually a world much sadder and more desolate but also more intricately fascinating than the reader's own. It's a nice place to visit, but, as the saying goes, you wouldn't want to live there. More well known for her Weetzie Bat series, Block produced this collection of short stories to show teenage girls that they are all goddesses. The stories themselves are crazy, postmodern fairy tales set mostly in and around the trashy beauty of Los Angeles.
Block takes on serious topics like homophobia, racism, and drug use in nearly every story.
The lyrical beauty of this story leaves the reader mourning the fact that it only lasts for 11 pages, while inferior stories drag on much longer. Though some of the nine stories don't quite live up to Block's potential, the book redeems itself with the quirky loveliness of its descriptions and its characters. Readers familiar with the hit movie Trainspotting will recognize Welsh's description of Edinburgh's heroin-stained underworld immediately, because Welsh wrote the book that movie was based on. Trainspotting is a singularly disgusting but strangely fascinating piece of work that sucks its reader into a druggy maelstrom with its harsh, painstaking realism. The Acid House doesn't outdo its predecessor in any way.