Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Ever since the world began
Women been banned from the ways of man
Listen boy cuz I've got a plan
Give it up, don't try to understand.
It ain't me
It's the people that say
Men are leading the women astray
But I say, it's the women today
Smarter than the men in every way" -- Norman Span, aka King Radio

"In the main building, as well as in several other prominent locations, pompous oil paintings of past headmasters, distinguished teachers, literary figures, and board presidents hung with imposing and slightly ridiculous grandeur. All of the subjects were men."

I recognize that for some people, it might be easy to view the U.S. as a place where things have always been and continue to be fair for women. Hey, it's been the better part a century now since women have been permitted to vote. One has to be my age or older to remember when the classifieds in the daily paper listed different rates of pay for the same job based upon whether one was a female or a male. And it's similarly been decades since the Supreme Court recognized the right of women to utilize birth control, control their own bodies, demand parity with men in the college admissions process and in the funding of high school sports teams, and actually found female justices included among its ranks.

I could just imagine high school sophomore Frankie Landau-Banks someday sitting on the U. S. Supreme Court. Frankie is a bright young woman who has blossomed physically over the summer and has now caught the attention of dreamboat and newspaper heir Matthew Livingston. She attends Alabaster, the exclusive New England boarding school previously attended by her father and grandfather before each of them headed over to Harvard. For Frankie, it is mystifying why the paternalism that existed at Alabaster during those previous generations appears to remain so alive and well in the Twenty-first century.

And why, she ponders, are women at Alabaster still not being permitted entry into the Loyal Order of the Basset Hound, the generations-old Old Boy male-only secret society at the school? Following her attendance at a Basset-instigated nighttime party on a nearby golf course -- and a lip-locking session with Matthew -- Frankie imagines what she might have done differently if she were in the loop:

"Most young women when confronted with the peculiarly male nature of certain social events -- usually those incorporating beer or other substances guaranteed to kill off a few brain cells, and often involving either the freezing-cold outdoors or the near suffocating heat of a filth dorm room, but which can also, in more intellectual circles , include the watching of boring Russian films -- will react in one of three ways...but Frankie Landau-Banks did none. Although she went home that night feeling happier than she had ever done in her short life, she did not confuse the golf course party with a good party, and she did not tell herself that she had had a pleasant time.
"It had been, she felt, a dumb event preceded by excellent invitations.
"What Frankie did that was unusual was to imagine herself in control. The drinks, the clothes, the invitations, the instructions, the food (there had been none), the location, everything. She asked herself: If I were in charge, how could I have done it better?"

Frankie's high-tech scheme to hijack leadership of the Bassets and her epiphanies regarding male-think and continuing male dominance make for a great and exuberant story that will ignite the imaginations of many young adults.

But that scheme is just the beginning of what makes THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS an extraordinary read and a book that will really brand E. Lockhart as a major league YA author. Among other memorable aspects is Frankie's being inspired to linguistic innovation as the result of reading Brit writer P. D. Wodehouse. Another is the philosophical probing of rules, for which the author introduces us to the concepts of the panopticon:

"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, which was never actually built.
"The architecture of Bentham's panopticon was created to allow a watchman to look at all his prisoners without the prisoners knowing whether or not they were being observed -- making them feel as if they were constantly being watched by an omniscient being.
"In other words, everyone in the panopticon knew they could be watched at all times, so in the end, only minimal watching actually needed to happen. The panopticon would create a sense of paranoia so pervasive that its inhabitants became practically self-governing."

Recently, a library student asked her fellow members of a listserve to which she belonged to cite examples of stellar adolescent role models. In my book, the contemplative, vulnerable, brilliant, and tough Frankie Landau-Banks is a heck of a Twenty-first century adolescent role model.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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