Frankie & Stankie. Barbara Trapido

by Barbara Trapido

Book Overview

Dinah and her sister Lisa are growing up in 1950's South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. They are two little girls from a dissenting liberal family. At school, the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0747599599
• ISBN13: 9780747599593
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
• Length: 307 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Trapido's Best So Far

This is the book Barbara Trapido fans have been waiting for. For all those who have almost enjoyed her books but felt that sometimes style triumphed over substance, Trapido's (one suspects) highly biographical novel of growing up in South Africa in the 1950s has the meat that has been previously lacking. At times the tale she tells is almost too awful to contemplate, but deftly woven into the story of oppression and an unthinkable lack of human rights is the brilliantly remembered childhood and adolescence. Dinah, the main character, is a sickly brainbox who hates sport and has a weakness for fashion and silliness. Her mother is a German immigrant whose well-off family fall on hard times in South Africa. Her father is a Dutch mathematics professor with some dour 50s Spartan influences, but liberal tendencies. Dinah is a mix of them both and it is her take on the situation that makes the book. Maybe toward the end, Trapido seems to be throwing information at the reader in order to finish up, but by then I'd had a really good read and was prepared to forgive. If this sounds like the sort of thing you like, give it a go.

Another winner from Barbara Trapido

It is so unfortunate that this wonderful writer is not recognized in America. Every one of her books resonates with wonderful plots and characters, yet I find I have to special order many of them from the UK. This one, possibly her most personal, follows the young life of a girl in Durban, South Africa, during the implementation of apartheid. Being blessed by having enlightened parents and, as her father puts it, strong abstract reasoning, Dinah is appalled at the injustices imposed by the apartheid system. This shameful history is documented here in prose that is understandable, warm and sometimes humorous. Her experiences at her different schools, relationships with the various girlfriends and (later) men she meets, and her truly original family are presented with three-dimensional clarity. When as an adult she leaves for England, she finds she loves her new home, can remember with affection but not longing the positives of her childhood home, but is especially glad that "public holidays are called bank holidays because they aren't commemorating an endless succession of brutal events in which white persons w/gunpowder have laid waste to brown persons w/spears."