Review: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

by E. Lockhart 

Edição/reimpressão: 2009 

Páginas: 345 

Editor: Disney-Hyperion

Burble:

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14: Debate Club. Her father's "bunny rabbit." A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston. Frankie Landau-Banks. No longer the kind of girl to take "no" for an answer.
Especially when "no" means she's excluded from her boyfriend's all-male secret society. Not when her ex-boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places. Not when she knows she's smarter than any of them. When she knows Matthew's lying to her. And when there are so many, many pranks to be done.
Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16: Possibly a criminal mastermind. This is the story of how she got that way.

Rating: 4/5

Review:

Once in a while I get my hands on a book that I read in one go. It’s became rarer and rarer that I do so because books are becoming bigger and some plot lines are becoming quite predictable making me bored quite easily. I picked up Frankie because her book was recommended by GoodReads in the “if you read and loved that you will love this” section. So I added Frankie to the list and eventually bought the book at a Charity Shop.

Last Friday I was all alone at the office and didn’t have much to do so when I finished my work load I picked up the book so I would look busy. It was definitively a bad move since I couldn’t put it down. I read it all the way home in the bus and continued to read as I had my tea. I finished it around 7pm and knew my world would never be the same.

I really can’t explain what it was that Frankie did to me. There was just something new and refreshing in the narrator’s voice, and something completely unexpected in the storyline. Mainly I think because the book starts off as a typical high school romance and suddenly it’s not. Out of the blue this secret society appears as well as   Frankie’s feminist older sister, Zara, along with some pranks, e-mails and a very intelligent girl who won’t take a chauvinist “no” for an answer.

Nothing is what it seems in this book, at a point I was fairly certain we would get a love triangle but that was completely dismissed two pages after. Frankie’s adventures and her own growth as she explores this new world that opened up for her but at the same time closes her off are the same adventures most girls have when they grow and suddenly start getting attention from boys.

Another thing that makes Frankie’s adventure so interesting is how a nice girl ends up becoming an evil genius and although one might argue that Frankie was always a genius and that she didn’t become an Evil Overlord it’s interesting to see her journey through her teenage years, and how she finds herself half pushed into, half embracing the situations that destiny (and the boys) puts in front of her.

An unique and interesting coming of age book that I recommend for intelligent girls that won’t take a “no” for an answer.