His relationship with Alice feels a bit contrived and their romance is superfluous and unnecessary when viewed next to the strength of each of their relationships with Frank. The only part of the story that fell flat is the role of the character Xander, who serves as Frank's sole male role model, and he's not a very good one by the standards of keeping promises, holding a job, and maturity (despite being well into middle age), but he loves Frank, and for Frank, that really is sufficient. Frank is, by far, one of my favorite children in literature and I would love to see more of him if Julia Claiborne Johnson plans to continue his story! Alice and Frank's relationship is the heart of Be Frank with Me, but Frank's relationship with both his mother and the world around him is really the soul of the story. Like the reader, Alice is an interloper, a stranger, an outsider, being forced into a very delicate, sensitive, unfamiliar and precariously perched family unit, and she must learn to accept that role, and later embrace it if they are all to survive their summer of forced cohabitation together. While Alice is the narrator, the story does not belong to her, but to Frank and Mimi. While she is not outwardly critical of Mimi's decisions regarding Frank's upbringing, as the story is told in first person and exclusively from Alice's point of view, readers are acutely aware of how she really feels, not only about Mimi as a single mother, but also about Frank, whom she comes to love as if he were her own son. Instantly, though, I found myself drawn into Alice's experience as a publishing assistant trying to keep reclusive author Mimi on track to finish her widely anticipated second novel (think Harper Lee and Go Set a Watchman) and her efforts to keep an eye on Mimi's eccentric son, Frank.Īlice is a twenty-something know-it-all, just like me, and, like me and most other childless twenty-somethings, thinks she knows a helluva lot more about parenting than she really does. Admittedly, I was very hesitant to start reading Be Frank with Me as I had the dreaded 'required-reading-and-exams' flashbacks each time I looked at it, so I didn't actually start reading it until I was sitting on the plane to Denver.

Be frank with me review