Julia Franks

This novel begins in 1959, when a girl from Atlanta moves to Charlotte, North Carolina and makes friends with Luce, who had been part of a clique until her parents's scandalous divorce (all divorces at that time were scandals) got her kicked out of it. Edie is tall and pretty and could find a place in one of the popular groups (although not the married couples group -- marriage laws being different in North Carolina) but she prefers to spend her time with Luce and they quickly become very close, despite their differences. Luce has dreams of college and a career while Edie loves fashion magazines and feels comfortable in a world that expects her to make a good marriage. Their bond continues even when Edie becomes pregnant and is sent to a special home, but the strains begin to show and their friendship is lost. Twenty-five years later, Luce's daughter is facing the same situation as Edie.

The Say So looks at who gets to make decisions about pregnant women's lives and how those options change over time. This is a well-researched novel, and one that looks carefully at how unmarried women and girls who became pregnant were treated by the law, by society and by the very groups that formed to help them. While the earlier timeline was the more compelling story, the one set in 1984 was a reminder that even then those who became pregnant were still not given full agency over their own bodies and decisions, often for well-meaning but misguided reasons. I did wonder how a further timeline would look, being written about Luce's granddaughter today might look.

Franks has written another novel, Over the Plain Houses, also concerned with how women's lives looked in the past, and I'm interested to see what project she undertakes next.… (más)

A government agricultural agent comes to a small Appalachian town in Georgia at the tail end of the Depression. His wife is also employed to teach the local women about modern housekeeping. Irenie, a lay pastor's wife with a teenage son, is drawn to the freedom Mrs. Furman represents, even as her husband clings desperately to the traditions of his rigid faith.

This was a debut novel with a lot of promise, that nonetheless read very much as a first novel. Julia Franks writes well and the setting was well described. She has a talent for describing nature. But there was a simplicity to the characters that left out room for contradictions and complexity. Franks is clearly loves the area she is writing about and those passages a delight to read. I was frustrated by the tidiness of the ending and the way she turned one character into a monster, but I'll still be looking at anything Franks writes in the future.… (más)