A piece here and a piece there adds up to a scrapbook
For her graduation from high school in 1920, Frankie Pratt
receives a scrapbook and her father’s old Corona typewriter.
Despite Frankie’s dreams of becoming a writer, she must
forgo a college scholarship to help her widowed mother. But
when a mysterious Captain James sweeps her off her feet, her
mother finds a way to protect Frankie from the
less-than-noble intentions of her unsuitable beau.
Through a kaleidoscopic array of vintage postcards,
letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric
swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, menus, and more,
we meet and follow Frankie on her journey in search of
success and love. Once at Vassar, Frankie crosses paths with
intellectuals and writers, among them “Vincent” (alumna Edna
St. Vincent Millay), who encourages Frankie to move to
Greenwich Village and pursue her writing. When heartbreak
finds her in New York, she sets off for Paris aboard the
S.S. Mauritania, where she keeps company with two exiled
Russian princes and a “spinster adventuress” who is paying
her way across the Atlantic with her unused trousseau. In
Paris, Frankie takes a garret apartment above Shakespeare
& Company, the hub of expat life, only to have a certain
ne’er-do-well captain from her past reappear. But when a
family crisis compels Frankie to return to her small New
England hometown, she finds exactly what she had been
looking for all along. Author of the New York
Times Notable Book Jackie by Josie, Caroline
Preston pulls from her extraordinary collection of vintage
ephemera to create the first-ever scrapbook novel,
transporting us back to the vibrant, burgeoning bohemian
culture of the 1920s and introducing us to an unforgettable
heroine, the spirited, ambitious, and lovely Frankie Pratt.
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