Although I did not witness the phenomenon with my own eyes, I have it from a reliable source that my favorite local independent bookstore stocked The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt heavily for the 2011 Christmas season — and it sold very well. Yes, it is the kind of book that would make a nice gift — for the right person.
The story line is pretty straightforward. I would characterize it as a version of a coming of age account. Written in the first person, it follows the life of Frankie (Frances) Pratt from 1920 to 1928. During these years, she graduates from high school (in Cornish, New Hampshire), earns a degree from Vassar College, works for a magazine in New York while dating the brother of her college roommate, then travels to Paris where she lands a job with a small press owned by a man she knew at home. A family crisis calls her back to New Hampshire, where she finds love in an unexpected place.
The format is, well, kind of gimmicky. I’ve read and reviewed other graphic novels. Unlike Persepolis and The Invention of Hugo Chabret, Frankie Pratt does not include any original artwork. It features considerably less text than Lives of Shadows, still my favorite of this genre. Caroline Preston crafted this novel using vintage artwork from magazines, catalogs, postcards and other ephemera, confining her narrative to snippets of typewritten text. Her credits include a thanks to the 300+ eBay sellers from whom she purchased many of these cultural artifacts.
Alas, this approach just didn’t quite work for me. It doesn’t really look like a scrapbook. The pictorial representations of Frankie and her friends and family are totally discontinuous because Preston has used whatever images she can find to represent these characters in different settings. I think a real scrapbook would have photographs. All of the text is typewritten, although I would expect some handwritten notes in a real scrapbook. Some of the artifacts, like pieces of string, coins, sunglasses, a pencil, a medal and a key, are three-dimensional and so wouldn’t have worked very well in a real scrapbook either. Frankie might have kept those in a box of memorabilia, but that’s a whole other thing.
The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is an expensive little piece of production, too, with a sewn binding, relatively heavy, glossy paper and four-color printing throughout. Small wonder the work was done in China! The suggested retail price is $25.99, although I see new copies are already available on the Internet for half that price just a week after Christmas.
Nice idea, but not quite a hit, at least for me.
(Ecco Books, 2011)
