WITCH BABY by Francesca Lia Block...

WITCH BABY by Francesca Lia Block (HarperCollins: $13.95; 112 pp.) The reviewer’s best friend is the easy comparison. “Leon Garfield is a 20th-Century Dickens.” “Charles Dickens is a 19th-Century Leon Garfield.” And so on. Imagine the reviewers’ discomfort, then, when Francesca Block’s first young-adult novel “Weetzie Bat” was published, and readers discovered one of the most original books of the last 10 years. The best we critics could do was to describe it as a punk fairy tale. If that meant that the eponymous heroine Weetzie and her film-maker husband, My Secret Agent Lover Man, lived happily ever after, what of the other members of their nontraditional family, Dirk and his lover Duck of the perfect blond flat top, and what of the two little girls, Cherokee and Witch Baby, whose respective parentage is . . . problematical? What became of them? In Block’s wonderful new book, “Witch Baby,” we find out. The answers are as unpredictable as those that concluded the first book. If “once upon a time” is the setting of this sweetly satisfying sequel, then--its heroine Witch Baby wonders--”What time are we upon and where do I belong?” How Witch Baby undertakes to discover these answers is the substance of this extraordinary encore story.