Francie (Coretta Scott King Author Honor Books) - Hardcover

English, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374324565 ISBN 13: 9780374324568

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 1999

Synopsis

A distinctive new voice in children's fiction

Francie lives with her mother and younger brother, Prez, in rural Alabama, where all three work and wait. Francie's father is trying to get settled in Chicago so he can move his family up North.

Unfortunately, he's made promises he hasn't kept, and Francie painfully learns that her dreams of starting junior high school in an integrated urban classroom will go unfulfilled. Amid the day-to-day grind of working odd jobs for wealthy white folks on the other side of town, Francie becomes involved in helping a framed young black man to escape arrest -- a brave gesture, but one that puts the entire black community in danger. In this vivid portrait of a girl in the pre--Civil Rights era South, first-time novelist Karen English completes Francie's world using lively vernacular and a wide array of flesh-and-blood characters. Francie is a 2000 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book.

About this title

Review

Francie is happiest up on her hill, bare feet pushed into the cool grass, eating a Scooter Pie, reading a Nancy Drew mystery, and--best of all--waving at "her" train as it heads up the tracks to Birmingham. Life isn't easy being a quiet, bright, "colored" eighth-grader growing up in the '30s in Noble, Alabama. The fact that Francie can be a little willful doesn't always help. Her train promises escape, the chance to travel to "places of possibility." And anywhere seems better than Noble, with its "pickaninny" racism and back-breaking routine, where she slaves away with her mother cooking and cleaning for white folks in town (when she isn't studying hard at Booker T. Washington, her clapboard country school, that is).

Francie dreams of Chicago, where her father moved a year ago to work as a Pullman porter, promising to send for Francie, her little brother Prez, and their mama as soon as he could. But Daddy has yet to come through, and Noble begins to offer possibilities of its own, the most exciting being when Francie puts her reading smarts to use tutoring an unschooled 16-year-old from nearby New Carlton. When he gets framed for attacking a white foreman, though, the courageous Francie can't keep from trying to help, endangering herself and those she holds dear. A convincing, transporting tale from Karen English, author of such lovely picture books as Just Right Stew. (Ages 9 to 12) --Paul Hughes

About the Author

Karen English has written several picture books and Strawberry Moon, her second novel. She lives in Richmond, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374324565
• ISBN 13: 9780374324568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208