It’s 1920, and one of the first things she does there is bob her hair. After graduating, Frankie finds herself in Greenwich Village, then Paris, bumping up against all the familiar tropes of the Jazz Age literary scene: the birth of The New Yorker, reading the banned “Ulysses,’’ drinking too much with fellow expats in the Latin Quarter.
Somehow, Preston manages to make this scene feel fresh - partly because “The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt’’ really is a scrapbook, each page composed of artifacts: advertisements, yearbook photos, ticket stubs, menus from the automat, and paper dolls modeling their finest. Frankie’s voice emerges in brief, self-deprecating captions that propel the book’s zippy plot through the visually vivid landscape Preston has created (thanks, she says in her acknowledgments, to “more than 300 eBay sellers’’). The marriage of text and image is familiar to readers of comic books and graphic novels, yet the aesthetic here owes more to nostalgia - and speaks, though from another era, to today’s hugely popular scrapbooking hobby. Because the story unfolds largely through surface details, it doesn’t frequently delve into profundity, but its vintage graphics and sweet, sincere storytelling make it a pure pleasure.
At the writing of the Declaration of Independence, our young country was an experiment in the relationship between a government and the governed - in America’s case, a uniquely (at the time) circular arrangement. In introducing their book, Claire Gaudiani and David Graham Burnett argue that the Declaration carries implicit messages about responsibility and expectations, messages received by people whose political and even public lives were constrained or forbidden. Denied the vote, legally unable to own property, women nevertheless built some of our most enduring institutions and invented a whole new type of enterprise: the private nonprofit organization.
