The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. LockhartHyperion, 2008

This YA book starts with “A Piece of Evidence,” a letter dated 2007 from one Frances Rose Landau-Banks (everyone calls her Frankie) to the headmaster of Alabaster Preparatory Academy, confessing that she “was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds” (1). Based on this, and the list that follows of “the 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,” I expected this to be a prep-school caper book, a book about those “mal-doings” and the story behind them. But there’s more going on in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and that more, 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 “disruptions” 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.

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 all-male, despite the school having gone co-ed; it’s the kind of place with walls of “pompous oil paintings of past headmasters, distinguished teachers, literary figures, and board presidents,” all of which depict men (25). One thing that is great is the “Cities, Art, and Protest” elective Frankie’s taking, in which “the 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” (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.

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.)


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2 responses to “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. LockhartHyperion, 2008”

  1. Jenny @ Reading the End Avatar

    I didn’t think of Frankie in terms of my own high school experience, really, so I’m having to think about this. I read the book a few years ago and my memory of it is imperfect! Certainly when I was in high school, I was aware of and frustrated with the privilege that the boys at the school were receiving. There were three girls at my school for every one guy, and the guys thought they were hot shit. And despite the gender imbalance being heavily tilted towards girls, guys received the majority of academic awards every year from the teachers. It drove me batty.

  2. Heather Avatar
    Heather

    Ugh, guys getting the majority of academic awards even though numbers-wise they weren’t the majority – yeah, that would have driven me nuts. That is the kind of thing that makes me happy I went to an all-girls school. Not that I loved my high school experience – obviously high school girls can be mean with or without boys around, and it was pretty homophobic, and my class of twenty people felt like one big clique with the exception of a few of us who were not in it, but: academically, I felt like my work and intelligence were recognized by my teachers. Which wouldn’t necessarily have been any different at a co-ed school, in the place where I grew up, but I don’t know that for sure/it was nice that gender couldn’t even come into it.

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