Frankie's Place

Journalist Jim Sterba grew up fatherless on a farm in Michigan. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frances "Frankie" Fitzgerald enjoyed a privileged childhood. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they fall in love, marry, and move into Frankie's place, an idyllic, isolated cabin on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Narrator Christopher Lane does an admirable job relating Sterba's morning jogs, the couple's icy dips in Somes Sound, and the exhausting hikes Sterba fondly refers to as "Frankie's Survival School." From the "proper" way to eat lobster to Sterba's war with mice in the cottage (he consults Sun Tzu's THE ART OF WAR), Lane keeps the tone appealing. This is a love story with recipes celebrating the delectable dishes life offers--culinary and otherwise--if we're conscious enough to notice. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 12, 2003
Rarely does a subtitle describe a book so well as this one encapsulates journalist Sterba's experiences at the New England cabin of his friend, fellow writer and Pulitzer Prize–winner Frances "Frankie" FitzGerald. This is a work suffused with love of every stripe, from the romantic kind to the kind one might feel for a place, a way of life and a really good dinner. Although memoirs that arise from such contented sighs are sometimes overly sentimental, Sterba's journalistic edge keeps the prose far from mushy. It also makes for a strange yet delightful combination of elements. Mixed in with his tale of falling in love with Frankie are memories from his days reporting on Asia for the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal, thoughts about lobster and descriptions of prosaic events like brushing his teeth or reading the New Yorker. There are also some recipes that are probably best cooked at a cabin in Maine, after a bracing swim or a stroll through a town store that still sells penny candy. Sterba is a practical romantic who can dream away an afternoon on a sailboat but still hold a lively conversation about how tripartite boat ownership necessitates a consensus during an extensive naming session for the craft. As his relationships with the boat, Maine and cooking unfold over the course of one summer, so too does his romance with Frankie, all of it taking on the same vacation-like pace that's suffused with leisure but quickens with bursts of activity. This is a beautiful memoir, giving a glimpse not just of a person but of a time and a place worth noting. Agent, Robert Lescher. (July)Forecast:Blurbs from Joan Didion, Tom Brokaw and David Halberstam, combined with release in the middle of vacation book reading season, should help this sell strongly.