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A review by michaelstearns
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
5.0
So, so good. And about real, complicated issues.
This has been a year of important teen novels (I count Little Brother among those), stories that pick up the notion of civil disobedience and make it fresh, fun, and relevant for younger readers. This is one of those books. Happily, it's also about many other things: gender roles; power relationships; self-worth v. value assigned by position in society; the ability of smart acts of guerrilla art to provoke thought; how inclusion and exclusion affect people; language and how it controls our thinking; Foucault notions of discipline and punishment; the desire to be loved v. the desire to be recognized for who you are; how women are still pigeon-holed, diminished, made less by men's expectations and their own.
And there's more, much more, but listed this way makes the book sound like dry, heady stuff, and it is anything but. Lockhart's great achievement here is that she's talking about all of this material by telling us the story of a girl who longs to be more than is expected of her. Frankie's story is told with real wit and grace and never loses sight of why we read in the first place: Because we want to know what happens to a person we're interested in.
I've a favorite line from an Alain de Botton book in which he's writing about Montaigne's essays: "We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are." Or, in this case, who we want to be.
I'm not even going to discuss the plot, which has hijinks and romance (which guy will she choose? or will she choose either? etc.) and humor and other good things.
Anyway, a great teen novel.
(Bonus kvetch: A few readers I know found the opening pages cold and off-putting, and they stopped reading.
Fools.
Yes, initially, the tone of this novel may seem a bit distant—there's an almost clinical aspect to the voice that may rebuff readers who expect their teen lit to be whorishly easy to cozy up to—but that distance is illusory and quickly falls away. The voice here is what one should expect from an interested-but-superficially-dispassionate chronicler (who would pen a book entitled The Disreputable History of...), and that the reader warms up to Frankie as fast as we do is a sign of just how fantastically well put-together this novel is.)
This has been a year of important teen novels (I count Little Brother among those), stories that pick up the notion of civil disobedience and make it fresh, fun, and relevant for younger readers. This is one of those books. Happily, it's also about many other things: gender roles; power relationships; self-worth v. value assigned by position in society; the ability of smart acts of guerrilla art to provoke thought; how inclusion and exclusion affect people; language and how it controls our thinking; Foucault notions of discipline and punishment; the desire to be loved v. the desire to be recognized for who you are; how women are still pigeon-holed, diminished, made less by men's expectations and their own.
And there's more, much more, but listed this way makes the book sound like dry, heady stuff, and it is anything but. Lockhart's great achievement here is that she's talking about all of this material by telling us the story of a girl who longs to be more than is expected of her. Frankie's story is told with real wit and grace and never loses sight of why we read in the first place: Because we want to know what happens to a person we're interested in.
I've a favorite line from an Alain de Botton book in which he's writing about Montaigne's essays: "We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are." Or, in this case, who we want to be.
I'm not even going to discuss the plot, which has hijinks and romance (which guy will she choose? or will she choose either? etc.) and humor and other good things.
Anyway, a great teen novel.
(Bonus kvetch: A few readers I know found the opening pages cold and off-putting, and they stopped reading.
Fools.
Yes, initially, the tone of this novel may seem a bit distant—there's an almost clinical aspect to the voice that may rebuff readers who expect their teen lit to be whorishly easy to cozy up to—but that distance is illusory and quickly falls away. The voice here is what one should expect from an interested-but-superficially-dispassionate chronicler (who would pen a book entitled The Disreputable History of...), and that the reader warms up to Frankie as fast as we do is a sign of just how fantastically well put-together this novel is.)