A Life in Men

November 11, 2013
Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 17, Mary Grace wants to understand why her lifelong friendship with Nix went awry during an ill-fated Greek vacation before their junior year of college. She can’t ask Nix, who has passed away, so she moves to London, where Nix lived in the months prior to her death. For a short time, Mary assumes Nix’s name and adventurous personality and begins to experiment with a wild, seedy lifestyle, describing everything in a diary addressed to her dead friend while trying to hide or ignore her own resurfacing illness. Mary’s determination to compress an entire lifetime of experiences into a few years results in some spectacularly poor decisions, but because her illness remains mild for a decade, her travels and the men she loves have a doomed, romantic quality, until the book’s conclusion. The aftermath of the Greek vacation unfolds inexorably, as Mary’s current storyline masterfully plays out to its conclusion. Frangello’s (Slut Lullabies) novel packs an emotional punch throughout, particularly in its final third. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean Naggar Agency.

February 15, 2014
Frangello's ambitious second novel travels the world--to Kenya, London and beyond--searching for the kind of experiences that will validate two short lives. In the late 1980s, college sophomores Nix and Mary leave Ohio to summer in Greece. Mary has just been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, and though it's unusual to be diagnosed so late (the disease kills most people in childhood), her prognosis is grim--she won't live to 25. Nix wants her to embrace what little life she has, but things go horribly wrong on Mykonos, and the two part ways. A few years later, Mary is in London, having an affair with Joshua, a South African acrobat, and living in a place one notch above a squat. Among the charismatic drifters of Arthog House are Sandor, an artist, and Yank, a photographer who involves Mary in petty crime to support his heroin addiction. None of them know about Mary's CF. One day, while out with Yank, Mary begins coughing up copious amounts of blood, their secrets now binding them in a kind of romantic nihilism. Nevertheless, Mary leaves with Joshua; they tour the world with his circus, ending up in Africa, where they work as safari guides. Having outlived her prognosis, Mary decides she wants normality and returns to the U.S. There are more men--as the title promises--each chapter named for the man who dominates a period in Mary's life before she leaves him. There's Eli, a married professor, and her birth father, Daniel, a handsome wastrel and former junkie currently living in a Mexican mansion. She becomes so sick while visiting Daniel that she returns to a hospital in the U.S., where she reunites with Geoff, the college student who rescued her and Nix in Mykonos. He's now an expert on her disease, as if he had been waiting for her. They settle down and, safe in the calm of matrimony, Mary goes to Amsterdam to meet her half brother Leo for the first time and finds both Sandor and Yank there too. For the last hundred pages, Leo, Sandor, Yank and Mary are in Morocco, under their sheltering sky, walking to Mary's death. Throughout the novel, Mary writes endlessly to Nix, though early on we learn she was killed not long after Mykonos in the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie and that Mary's whole short life has been a living tribute to the friend who saved her. A stunning novel--Frangello's broken characters live in a world of terror and redemption, of magnificent sadness and beauty.

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December 1, 2013

In the mid-1980s, when an American college student, Mary, is diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, she escapes to Greece with the only person who doesn't treat her with pity: her best friend, Nicole. In a twist of fate, Nicole's life ends prematurely, and Mary tries to outrun her emotional burdens by living hard and reinventing herself in London, where she is drawn to men who lead risky lives. Intense yet meditative, Frangello's second novel (after My Sister's Continent) asks how we would live if we knew our life was going to be cut short. Mary lives out an "entitled hedonism." Even after she marries a doctor who loves her, she is drawn back to a life of chasing adventure, and the one man who never treated her like a fragile object. VERDICT Frangello's sophisticated writing vividly brings to life the settings of Mary's exotic travels, including Mexico, Amsterdam, and Morocco; she smoothly streams the consciousness of her complex characters in the third-person point of view, which alternates among Mary and her lovers. Ambitious in breadth and scope, this work will appeal to fans of Barbara Kingsolver and those who like being immersed in foreign settings.--Sonia Reppe, Stickney-Forest View P.L., IL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014
Two college students and lifelong friends are vacationing in Greece in the 1980s. This is just one in a string of adventures for sexy, confident Nix, but for Mary it's a radical departure from the sheltered life overseen by her adoptive parents to keep her cystic fibrosis in check. Three years later, Mary is in London, grieving for Nix, whose fate remains a mystery for much of the novel. Mary lives on the edge, exacerbating her chronic illness, which Frangello (Slut Lullabies, 2010) depicts with unnervingly clinical specificity. She falls in love with a South African gymnast, and they travel the world. Frangello describes each setting with elegiac intensity, assembles a six-degrees-of-separation cast of characters lanced by secrets and pain, and embroiders a suspenseful, melodramatic, wildly excessive plot of interconnectivity, embodying Mary's desperate attempt to fill her numbered days to the brim. In this bravura performance, a quantum creative leap, contrivances and all, Frangello astutely dissects the quandaries of female sexuality, adoption, terminal illness, and compound heartbreak in a torrent of tough-minded observations, audacious candor, and storytelling moxie.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)