Frannie in Pieces

Frannie loses the one person in her life she feels really understands her. Danielle Ferland gives a believable voice to Frannie, making mysterious events seem real. On March 24, one week before she turns 15, Frannie discovers her father, an artist, dead in the bathroom. Two months later, she finds what she assumes was to be her birthday present, a handmade wooden box, filled with wooden puzzle pieces, with her name carved in the lid. As Frannie assembles the puzzle, she finds herself going into and out of the scene it depicts. As she learns to see beyond what her eyes tell her, Ferland skillfully depicts the pieces of this vulnerable teenager's life coming back together. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 24, 2007
When 15-year-old Frannie stumbles upon an elaborately carved box bearing her name as she is sorting through her late father's art studio, she assumes she has found a birthday present that he made for her before his recent, untimely death. Inside she finds a handmade, 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle; assembling it distracts Frannie from her grief and her growing obsession with death. But sometimes, usually when she is exhausted, the connected puzzle pieces seem to pull her inside them and transport her to a foreign place where she sometimes glimpses or even talks with a younger version of her father. In deftly conjuring up the magical element of this otherwise realistic novel, Ephron (How to Eat Like a Child
) explores themes about “puzzling” relationships, the process of mourning (which leaves Frannie “in pieces”) and seeing the larger picture. Frannie, an artist like her father and at odds with her more conventional mother and stepfather, feels too much pain to connect with anyone else, including her best friend. Whether or not Frannie's journeys into the jigsaw puzzle are figments of her imagination (plenty of evidence suggests they are not), her brief visits to its world have a profound psychological effect, answering some of her questions about love, art and life. Truths about Frannie's long-divorced parents emerge suddenly in a gratifying climax that forces Frannie, and readers, to reassemble her picture of her family and herself. With this imaginative and insightful first YA novel, Ephron, co-screenwriter for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
, should easily capture a new audience. Ages 12-up.