Even Xander, Frank's former piano teacher and now the household's general handyman and 'itinerant male role model,' can't bring Mimi out of her shell for long – though he does catch Alice's eye.Īlice, having been tasked by Mr Vargas with keeping notes on how things go with Mimi, narrates the whole book in the first person. Meanwhile, she's utterly failing in her central mission of gathering new material from the irritable Mimi, who locks herself in her study. Unsurprisingly, all this makes the poor lad unpopular with his peers, and one of Alice's biggest challenges is to get him back to school in August and come running any time he gets in trouble with bullies or the principal. But touch him or any of his possessions and expect a meltdown.

A natty dresser, he's most often found wearing vintage suits accessorized by a top hat, monocle or aviator goggles. His obsession is classic cinema, and he spouts trivia about the movies (and about everything else, too) whenever he gets the chance. 'My IQ is higher than 99.7 percent of the American public's,' he unabashedly declares to Alice that's not a boast, just a fact. As the title suggests, this is very much his book he steals every scene in which he appears. I doubt you've ever met a character quite like Frank. But there's one key difference here: Mimi has a nine-year-old son, Frank. She's the sort of figure Harper Lee was for decades: a one-hit literary wonder and an infamous recluse. Banning, Mimi issued a wildly successful novel back in the 1970s, Pitched, which quickly became a modern classic on every American adolescent's list of assigned reading for school.

In June 2009 Isaac Vargas sends his assistant, twenty-four-year-old Alice Whitley, to Bel Air, California to help Mimi Gillespie produce her long-awaited second novel.

Be frank with me novel