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When I was on my book tour for The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, I was often asked similar questions about how I created a scrapbook novel. Here is a list of the top Frankie Pratt FAQ’s. 1. What gave you the idea for doing a novel as a scrapbook?
I like to say the idea of making a scrapbook novel was 40 years in the making. As a little girl, I used to pore over my grandmother’s flapper scrapbook filled with dance cards, letters from old boyfriends, ocean liner tickets, and even long curls snipped when she got her hair bobbed.
My first three novels were what I guess you’d call “conventional” format—i.e. just words. My third novel Gatsby’s Girl was inspired by the meticulous scrapbook F. Scott Fitzgerald kept about his first love, Ginevra King—her first note to him, her handkerchief, and a newspaper clipping about her marriage to another man. Later he would turn the story of his unrequited crush into The Great Gatsby.
When I was casting around for the idea for my fourth novel, I wanted to create something that was as visual and powerful as a scrapbook. And then I had a crazy idea—why not make a novel that WAS a scrapbook. Not a digital scrapbook, but an actual one made of real stuff that I cut up with scissors and pasted together with glue.
2. What came first—the story or the memorabilia?
I started with my character, Frankie Pratt, and the outlines of her story, which was set in the 1920’s. I imagined an 18-year-old girl who wanted to become a writer and her journey which would take her to Vassar, Greenwich Village, and Paris.
Then I hunted down and bought all the things that a girl like Frankie would glue in her scrapbook—postcards, movie tickets, Vassar report cards, menus, sheet music, fashion spreads, popular magazines, a New York subway map, a Paris guidebook, and of course love letters. In all, I collected over 600 pieces of vintage 1920’s ephemera
3. How did the memorabilia dictate the story?
Frankie’s story changed and evolved as I found surprising things—for example an original book cover for The Sun Also Rises. The book caused a huge fuss in Paris when it came out in 1926 because everyone recognized the characters, and she would have been right there to bear witness.
4. Why did you choose to set Frankie’s story in the 1920s?
Like a lot of people, I have a romantic obsession with the 1920’s when very aspect of life (especially for women) was turned upside down and reinvented. Women cut off their hair and hemlines, got the vote, went to work, and felt freed from Victorian behavior codes. Writing Frankie Pratt was a chance for me to indulge in some lovely time travel.
5. Where did you get a lot of the things featured in the scrapbook?
I had a surprising number of 1920’s items in my own collection of vintage paper. I stopped at every roadside antique store and junk shop I passed- in Mississippi, Virginia, New York and Illinois. (My favorite store is Whiting’s Old Paper in Mecanicsville, Va.) And also I bought over 300 items from eBay—so many that my mailman complained.
6. Do you think this was easier or harder than writing a novel in a more traditional manner?
Creating a scrapbook novel may not have been easier than writing a traditional novel, but it sure was a lot more fun! Writing a 300 page novel requires thousands of hours of sitting in a chair and staring at a blank computer screen. With Frankie Pratt, I could spend countless hours and dollars on eBay every day and tell my husband with a straight face that I was “working on my novel.”
7. What are you working on next?
I have started in on my next scrapbook novel, this one kept by a bride during her first year of marriage 1959-1960. I like to think of it as a prequel to Mad Men. My favorite finds so far: a 1959 Brides magazine, the Betty Crocker Bride’s Cookbook, a 1960 sex manual, View-Master slides, a set of bride and groom paper dolls…
 Russell Hoban, ‘Frances’ Author, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com.
“Hoban began writing children’s books in the late 1950s. His first, “What Does It Do and How Does It Work?,” featured Mr. Hoban’s own drawings of dump trucks, steam shovels and other heavy machinery. But he didn’t care for illustrating his own books, and his second title, “Bedtime for Frances ,” a gentle tale about the delaying tactics of a child being sent off to bed, was illustrated by Garth Williams, with Frances as a furry little badger.
In the six Frances books that followed, including “A Baby Sister for Frances,” “A Birthday for Frances” and a poetry collection, “Egg Thoughts and Other Frances Songs,” the illustrator was Mr. Hoban’s wife, Lillian.”
Bread and Jam for Frances was a cherished book of my childhood, but I’m sorry to say I never took that book-love further to find out anything about the author. (Nor did I realize the illustrator, Garth Williams, was the same man who did the Little House books, and Charlotte’s Web .) But Frances remains with me to this day.
What excites me most about ereading is the ability to borrow ebooks from the public library. After a shaky start, a few recent developments have helped libraries to move forward with digital lending, though not without some roadblocks.
Libraries ramp up e-book lending – USATODAY.com.
After a tentative foray into digital lending on PCs and e-readers several years ago, public libraries are opening the next chapter for smartphones and tablet computers.
The movement kicked into high gear in September when Amazon finally turned on its Kindle for 11,000 local libraries, triggering a flood of new users. App developers are also working with libraries to enable book lovers to borrow on their smartphones.
“With more devices for consumers to try, they’re going to get better,” says Christopher Platt of the New York Public Library. “And the e-reading experience will get better.”
The evolution is playing out amid some challenges, including an ongoing squabble between eager-to-grow libraries and publishers that fear copyright infringement and losing money on digital distribution, their fastest-growing segment of business.
Some large publishers — such as Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hatchette — refuse to sell to libraries, thus limiting the availability of popular titles.
Still, customers’ appetite for e-book lending is growing unabated. According to Library Journal, public libraries increased their offerings by 185% this year. E-books will account for 8% of their materials budget in five years, it says.
I can’t afford to buy every ebook I’d like to read, nor do I really need to, just like printed books. I’m a frequent library borrower, but that often involves requesting copies from other branches, waiting for them to come in, scurrying to the library when it’s open and I’m not at work, an intersection of events that can sometimes be rare. To borrow an ebook, though, all I need to do is go online, browse, and download in minutes. Magic!
Ever have that experience where EVERYONE YOU KNOW seems to love a book, and you figure, okay, it’s got to be decent at least, I’ll give it a read. And then you just… really don’t like it?
I read two memoirs recently, memoirs that were rather highly acclaimed aroundabouts, and both times, I was pretty darned disappointed. I’ve never had a particular affinity for memoirs, one way or another, but awhile back I read, and loved to pieces, the wonderful Queen of the Road by the amazing Doreen Orion. So I thought, hey, maybe it’s not just a fluke, and memoirs/personal accounts are great reads in general. But that hasn’t been my experience since.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Everyone read it. Everyone loved it. Julia Roberts made a movie, which some people loved and some people hated, but that always happens with a book-to-movie transfer. I expected to at least enjoy the book to some degree, but I can’t say that I did. The eating part was okay, but too cluttered with waaayyyy depressing divorce stuff. The praying part was not, shall we say, my cup of tea. And the love? Too short. Too undetailed. I mean, after all that traumatic, depressing eating (if you’re going to binge eat, for crying out loud, enjoy it a little more, and please describe the cheesy goodness so I can experience it vicariously) and then the tedious praying, I felt like I deserved some more specifics on the hookups.
For some reason, I then continued my foray into this genre with Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen. I know all about Mennonites, because of the genealogy work I did in my last job. My volunteer Barb transcribed a set of Mennonite letters for me, over the course of several months; by the end she was threatening to reach back through time and shake the living daylights out of some Mennonites, or at least kidnap them and get them drunk on tequila. But that’s a different story, and a more interesting one than Ms. Janzen told, to be frank. Also written post-messy divorce (I sense a memoir theme), there was a little about Mennonite food (grossy sounding), some funny bits about her mother, dating highlights, and very little point to a rather rambling account of… well, nothing, really, other than a newly-divorced woman staying with her parents for a bit. Pointless.
Shrug. I’ll probably skip memoirs for a bit, no matter how highly recommended.
What about you? Any highly recommended yet big disappointments in your recent reading history?
Regal Literary has announced a Winter Holiday Book Giveaway. The season of curling up with a great book on a cold night and looking for the perfect holiday gift for the bookworm in your life is fast approaching, and we wanted to share some of our favorite books, including:
Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry – signed!
Martin Clark’s The Legal Limit – signed!
Alex Heard’s The Eyes of Willie McGee – signed!
Keith Scribner’s The Oregon Experiment – signed!
Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies
Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral For a Dog
Matt Blackstone’s A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie
Scott Cohen’s Don’t You Just Hate That? 738 Annoying Things
Nancey Flowers and Courtney Park’s He Was My Man First
Enter to win at http://www.regal-literary.com/contests/winter/.
Yesterday, Amazon announced its Best Books of 2011. From their web site: “So many books. So many choices. It’s not easy putting together a list of the year’s best books, but we’ve held many meetings and votes, we’ve pored over the books and occasionally poured our hearts out to get you this final Top 100. For every book on the list, there has been an impassioned plea and an argument made–so don’t just look at the Top 10 or 20. There are great books all up and down the Top 100 list.”
Here’s the “Best of” list, but there are category break-downs as well (Mystery & Thrillers, Nonfiction, Quirky & Strange, etc. — actually, there are bound to be some great finds in there!).
1. “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach: “The Art of Fielding” is the veritable baseball book that’s actually about much more than baseball, and it’s on par with the work of Bernard Malamud and David James Duncan. It’s rare to see a debut so confident, intimate, unpredictable and wholly memorable.
2. “1Q84” by Haruki Murakami: Murakami has created a sensation: a nearly 950-page novel that is ordered and scrupulous, and reads like a meditation. “1Q84” is the story of two people living in parallel, who we know must meet each other eventually, and their twisting arcs drive this magnum opus by one of the world’s finest novelists.
3. “What It Is Like to Go to War” by Karl Marlantes: The veteran marine and best-selling author of “Matterhorn” draws on his brutal experiences in foreign jungles to look at the nature of combat with unflinching honesty. Balancing novelistic descriptions of fear, power games and courage with a thoughtful prescription for our soldiers’ well being, Marlantes lifts the bar for understanding the experience of war.
4. “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larsen: Master storyteller Larsen describes the life of America’s first and only ambassador to Nazi Germany, along with the scandalous adventures of the ambassador’s carefree daughter. “In the Garden of the Beasts” is an historical portrait that is as entertaining as it is important, and it reads like the best of political thrillers.
5. “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides: Eugenides’ third novel, and his first after the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex,” describes the lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 1980s. It is a thoughtful, and at times disarming, novel about life, love and discovery, set during a time when so much of life seemed filled with deep portent.
6. “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” by Laini Taylor: With this young adult novel, National Book Award finalist Taylor has created a magical world that will sweep up even the most jaded of readers. The story of 17-year-old Kalou is an enchanting tale of magic, star-crossed love and difficult choices with heartbreaking repercussions that could make it the next hot YA sensation.
7. “Before I Go to Sleep” by S.J. Watson: Suspenseful from start to finish, Watson’s ”Before I Go to Sleep” — the story of Christine, who wakes up every day not knowing who she is — presents profound questions about identity and is one of the best literary thrillers of the past few years. Compelling, immersive and chilling.
8. “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson: Few in history have transformed their time like Steve Jobs has. In this timely book, Isaacson paints a vivid, compelling portrait that pulls no punches — the end result is satisfying, complete, and gives insight into a man who managed to turn his contradictions into potent strengths.
9. “Lost in Shangri-La” by Michael Zuckoff: A riveting story of survival and deliverance from a notorious valley in the New Guinea jungle, Zuckoff’s ”Lost in Shangri-La” deserves its place among the great survival stories of World War II.
10. “The Tiger’s Wife” by Téa Obreht: Croatian native Obreht tells the story of a young doctor seeking answers around her grandfather’s death, delving into a land of storytelling, mythology, and conflict in her extraordinary debut.
 Received an interesting new release in the mail the other day, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston. From the publisher:
“Pulling from her own extraordinary collection of vintage ephemera and memorabilia, [Preston] creates the first ever scrapbook novel, transporting us back to the vibrant, burgeoning bohemian culture of the 1920s… We see an enticing array of flapper-era postcards, letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, menus, and other memorabilia featured on each and every page.”
Video book trailer:
Frankie Pratt
Sample pages here.
Looks interesting. It reminds me, in a slightly less mysterious vein, of Nick Bantock’s wonderful Griffin & Sabine books. Hopefully it can live up to that promise.
Apparently, someone goofed. Lauren Myracle, who wrote a book called Shine about a gay teenager who is the victim of hate crime, was elated to learn her work had been named a finalist in the National Book Awards. Whoops, thought — turns out it was a mistake, and the panel meant to name a different book, named Chime by Franny Billingsley. While at first Myracle’s book was left on the list, the panel later asked the author to withdraw. Sheesh. Talk about a big let-down.
An Author Withdraws as Book Award Finalist
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: October 17, 2011
Lauren Myracle, the author of “Shine,” withdrew from the shortlist for the National Book Awards on Monday, soon after she was mistakenly named finalist.
 Amazon announced this week that George R.R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire series , has become the latest author to sell 1 million Kindle e-books. Honestly, I’m hardly surprised. I’m nearing the end of the third book myself (there are five in the series thus far, with more to come), I’ve bought each as an ebook, though I went with the Nook format. These books are long, and therefore, these books are heavy. I’m not hauling that thing on a plane.
Martin has now sold one million Kindle books through Amazon, reports the site. He joins a list that includes Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins, Michael Connelly, John Locke, Janet Evanovich and Kathryn Stockett.
“Groucho Marx once said, ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member,’ but even Groucho might have made an exception for the Kindle Million Club,” Martin says in the Amazon news release. “It’s a real thrill to be inducted into this one. There are no dues, no meetings, and I’ll be in some wonderful and exclusive company.”
Robert E. Lee tintype fetches $23,001 for Goodwill.
A Goodwill worker who spotted a photograph of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has helped the charity make $23,001 in an online auction. The tintype photograph was in a bin, about to be shipped out to an outlet store, when a worker grabbed it and sent it to the charity’s local online department. The item was put up for auction. Bidding started at $4.
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