{"id":6534,"date":"2014-11-10T18:02:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T23:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6534"},"modified":"2014-11-10T18:02:41","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T23:02:41","slug":"the-disreputable-history-of-frankie-landau-banks-by-e-lockharthyperion-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-disreputable-history-of-frankie-landau-banks-by-e-lockharthyperion-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. LockhartHyperion, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

This YA book starts with \u201cA Piece of Evidence,\u201d a letter dated 2007 from one Frances Rose Landau-Banks (everyone calls her Frankie) to the headmaster of Alabaster Preparatory Academy, confessing that she \u201cwas the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds\u201d (1). Based on this, and the list that follows of \u201cthe disruptions caused by the Order—including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy,\u201d I expected this to be a prep-school caper book, a book about those \u201cmal-doings\u201d and the story behind them. But there’s more going on in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks<\/em>, and that more<\/em>, and how it differed from my expectations, meant that I didn’t quite like this book as much as I expected to. Part of the problem was pacing: because I wanted the book to be about the \u201cdisruptions\u201d Frankie lists in her letter, I wanted them to start sooner than they did: the idea of planning pranks doesn’t come up until page 183, and it’s page 227 before the planning actually begins.<\/p>\n

Up until that point, what we get is Frankie’s story, and the story of how the place she’s in and the people she’s around are problematic for the self she’s becoming. In her freshman year of high school, Frankie was smart, but ordinary: she was on the debate team; she tagged along with her older sister; she wasn’t exceptionally pretty. But over the summer before sophomore year, puberty hits and her looks start turning heads. Back at school, she ends up dating a smart\/popular\/rich senior boy. Everything’s great, except it isn’t really: Frankie wasn’t super-close to any of her friends from freshman year, and now she’s got this circle of clever guys she gets to hang around with, by virtue of going out with one of them, except she’s not actually part of their circle: she knows her place in it will last only as long as her relationship does. And her boyfriend seems to like her more when she’s feigning helplessness than when she’s expressing her ambitions. And elements of her school are really patriarchal: her dad, who is an alum, was part of an all-male secret society that’s still<\/em> all-male, despite the school having gone co-ed; it’s the kind of place with walls of \u201cpompous oil paintings of past headmasters, distinguished teachers, literary figures, and board presidents,\u201d all of which depict men (25). One thing that is<\/em> great is the \u201cCities, Art, and Protest\u201d elective Frankie’s taking, in which \u201cthe students read architecture criticism, a history of Paris, and studied the panopticon—a kind of prison designed by late eighteenth\/early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham\u201d (53). All these things come together in the pranks Frankie orchestrates, in the what and why and how of them, and that’s pretty great, but I still wanted to get to the pranks sooner. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a thing I’m curious about is how much this book does or doesn’t resonate with women my age or younger, the extent to which women my age or younger feel or don’t feel like their high school experience had bits that are reminiscent of Frankie’s. (I went to an all-girls high school, and didn’t socialize much with guys beyond IM conversations with a guy I’d gone to junior high with and hanging out with a few male friends-of-friends: I never had the experience of being a girl on the edge of or excluded from a group of guys, and witnessing male privilege was not really part of my everyday experience at that age.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This YA book starts with \u201cA Piece of Evidence,\u201d a letter dated 2007 from one Frances Rose Landau-Banks (everyone calls her Frankie) to the headmaster of Alabaster Preparatory Academy, confessing that she \u201cwas the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds\u201d (1). Based on this, and the list that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}