Frankie is a young girl who desires to be a writer. The
reader follows an eight-year period in Frankie's life where
she meets several friends, wanders through Paris, and
encounters opportunities and unusual events and people.
One might think it is hard to connect to a character without
reading in "book format." However, Caroline Preston offers
the reader a unique chance to look inside Frankie's mind and
understand her character through a turbulent, changing time
of her life. Frankie will become a friend to the reader as
she accumulate artifacts and writes commentaries in the
margins. By completely immersing the reader into her life,
Frankie is a very memorable character that the reader will
be hard pressed to forget.
The reader will love Frankie's blunt honesty and fresh
outlook on life. Seemingly ever optimistic, Frankie is
cheerful and enviable. It is interesting to see how the
secondary characters really do affect and shape her life.
The opportunity to view some one's life actually changing
through the pages of a book is unique and intriguing. The
illustrations are wonderful. Preston clearly spent a long
time picking out which pictures and commentaries would be
perfect for this book. THE SCRAPBOOK OF FRANKIE PRATT: A
NOVEL IN PICTURES is a must have from 2011.
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.
Videos
Trailer for SCRAPBOOK OF FRANKIE PRATT
Interview with author Caroline Preston
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