It can be difficult enough to raise a "regular" kid, but how does one deal with an eccentric genius child? In her first novel, Julia Claiborne Johnson tackles that question with lighthearted humor and a taste for old movies. The Frank of Be Frank with Me is the nine-year-old son of recluse novelist M.M. "Mimi" Banning, who hit National Book Award and Pulitzer home runs with her first and only book. When her fortune disappears in a crooked investment scheme, she is forced to churn out a new book for a hefty advance. Like Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, Mimi's second novel will be a sure-thing bestseller and a lifeline for her editor, whose fate is uncertain after his publisher's latest merger. But Mimi needs someone to take care of Frank while she bangs her typewriter, and the publisher wants eyes-on-site to keep the manuscript moving.
Enter young editorial assistant Alice Whitley, a New York City transplant from Nebraska, who relishes the trip to Los Angeles to meet Mimi and has no fears about childcare for a nine-year-old. Until she meets Frank, who first appears "dressed in a tattered tailcoat and morning pants accessorized with bare feet and a grubby face... like some fictional refugee from the pages of Oliver Twist." Frank quotes lines from classic movies and peppers his conversation with 50-cent vocabulary words (as he tells Alice, "I read the dictionary for pleasure as it's always easy to find a stopping place"). Narrator Alice, with her farm-girl commonsense, holds this bizarre, oh-so-L.A. household together, but it is Frank who steals Johnson's show. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.