By E. Lockhart
Read: May 2009
Rating: Brilliant
Wow. This is one of the coolest books I’ve picked up in quite a while. Somehow a hardcover wound up on the Bargain table at Borders, and when I learned that A) Frankie was a girl, B) She was leading the Loyal Order of Basset Hounds, and C) She was possibly a criminal genius… I just had to buy it. Good choice.
It turns out that Frankie has won a crapload of awards including the National Book Award–which was given out at my university, long before I knew the book existed. CURSE YOU, CHANCE!!!
Frankie is a fifteen year old girl who attends a very classy boarding school–the kind that’s over a hundred years old and entrenched in Old Boy culture. This bothers Frankie on some level, but she hasn’t done much about it. Then, between freshman and sophomore year, she grows boobs and starts to feel rebellious. On her return to school, she is noticed by Matthew, the most popular boy there. She is welcomed to their lunch table with the other girlfriends… but girlfriends are, essentially, expendable. It’s the boys who are solid, the boys who are bonding for life and will one day be high-powered CEOs and politicians who do each other favors. Frankie watches other girls disappear from their radar as though they had never existed.
She wants in. She adores these boys and their camaraderie. She wants to join them, be part of this exclusive club… which it turns out is an actual club: The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. But she never can. They will never even consider it, because she is a girl. So Frankie takes matters into her own hands… she usurps control and starts orchestrating the biggest, most effective pranks the Order and the school have ever seen.
But will the boys ever really accept her? Will Matthew ever willingly confide in her?
This novel is unique in that Frankie is a strategist, and a very well informed one. When relationship crises come up with Matthew–is he breaking up with her?–she thinks through all her options. If she pouts, nothing. If she gets angry, nothing. So she responds with careful calculation as to the results. Her mind is awakening. Her sister exposes her to feminism. Her new class is about authority, disobedience, and questioning the standard use of spaces–about obedience. It’s an intellectual awakening paired with an awareness of her own emotional needs that is well beyond what most teens feel. At the same time Frankie is aware that something is changing in her, and that if she were normal she would be worried about girlish things and her other activities… not obsessing over the Basset Hounds.
Of course, things do eventually catch up with her. The boys don’t appreciate being played. Frankie isn’t entirely sure she likes the person she’s become: shred, secretive, calculating. Her family worry that she’s become unstable somehow.
I don’t think she has. I recognize in Frankie an intelligence and awareness that is rarely appreciated in teenagers. Those kids suffer without understanding and opportunity.
The only 1 Star review on Amazon is a complaint that the behaviors in the book “aren’t funny”–things like the boys drinking beer on the golf course, and Frankie spying on them. To which I say: Kids do these things. It doesn’t help to hide them.
In fact, this novel contains the most realistic teen dialog I’ve ever seen. It’s natural, current, and fun. I have had, and listened to, conversations just like these. It should be noted that the kids at this school are well-educated, but that just makes it even more fun. (Then again, maybe I’m the perfect audience for this book because I went to liberal arts school.)
As if all this weren’t enough, a quick poke around Lockhart’s website shows that she is an awesome woman, indeed. She loves Monty Pytho and read Piers Anthony as a kid, and she cites Helen Fielding and Louise Rennison (wait, how have I not reviewed anything by her yet?!) as inspiration. AND she’s read Libba Bray.
WANT. MORE. GIMME.
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