The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is the only novel I’ve ever read/seen created from odds and ends: a post card, a map, ads for the latest fashions. Frankie was given a scrapbook when she graduated from high school in 1920, along with her father’s old Corona typewriter. This inspired her to type out her story on squares of paper and paste them in the book alongside an appropriate ad or clipping from a magazine or newspaper. Will Atwater takes her to the movies on her first date. A ticket stub is pasted next to his snapshot, and a drawing of an impossibly handsome man in an ad for an Arrow shirt .
Frankie goes to Vassar, makes friends with sophisticated Allegra who teaches her to smoke, meets Vincent Millay, goes to a dance at Yale.
Each page is a delightful montage, headlines, cartoons, and always ads of young women in the latest fashions. They carry the story along: a map of Greenwich village, the S.S. Mauretania (3rd class), Paris in time to cheer Lindbergh’s landing.
This is a delightful book and I congratulate its author for her (well disguised) scholarship. She has taken us on a light hearted trip through the early years of the twentieth century, with not a foot note in sight.
published 2011
Carol Mylander says
I loved this book! It is a gift and great to read at Christmastime. Every page a delight !