Francesca is accustomed to struggling with her vibrant, overbearing mother, until the day that Mia doesn't get out of bed. To make things worse, Francesca is the only one in her group of friends to begin 11th grade at St. Sebastian's, a formerly all-male school still adjusting to its transition to co-ed status. As Francesca's family falls apart, she loses touch with her old, shallow friends and finds herself bonding with an unlikely group of girls and boys. She is embroiled in an initially adversarial flirtation with House leader William Trombal, who unfortunately already has a girlfriend.

The strengths of Saving Francesca are both the subject mattter (the ripple effect of Mia's depression strains Francesca's relationships with her father and teachers in addition to her mother) and the slow, deliberate filling out of characters through Francesca's sometimes unreliable narration. Francesca's eventual group of friends isn't just a clique-y group of girls as in many teen school-based novels, but a mix of slightly outcast boys and girls whom circumstances have thrown together. The characters are fresh and vibrant, and the ending brings the story to a satisfying full circle. ( )

Saving Francesca was a book about a girl named Francesca who goes to a basically all boys school. When her "mum" becomes depressed, Francesca finds her life much more complicated. She is angry at her father, becomes separated from her brother, and is having to deal with a very much up and down relationship- all while trying to help her mother.
I really enjoyed this book. It is a TEEN book, I would not want a kid to read it. There are cuss words in it ( a lot unfortunately). But it was still a good book and was a fun read. ( )

Richie's Picks: SAVING FRANCESCA by Melina Marchetta, Random House/Knopf, October 2004, ISBN 0-375-82982-2; lib. 0-375-92982-7

"School is St. Sebastian's in the city. It's a predominately all-boys' school that has opened its doors to girls in Year Eleven for the first time ever. My old school, St. Stella's, only goes to Year Ten and most of my friends now go to Pius Senior College, but my mother wouldn't allow it because she says the girls there leave with limited options and she didn't bring me up to have limitations placed upon me. If you know my mother, you'll sense there's an irony there, based on the fact that she is the Queen of Limitation Placers in my life. My brother, Luca, is Year Five at Sebastian's so my mother figured it would be convenient for all of us in the long run and my dad goes along with it because no one in my family has ever pretended that my mother doesn't make all the decisions."

Francesca Spinelli's mother, Mia, has always been a force to be reckoned with. She's a university lecturer in Communications who's accumulated a bunch of degrees as well as an equally impressive collection of expectations for her teenaged daughter:

"My mother forced me to take drama. 'You'll be in your element,' she said.
" 'She's shy,' my father tried to explain.
" 'Yes, in her left toe she's shy. She's just lazy. That's her problem. She's too busy worrying about what her friends--'
" 'I don't care what my friends think.'
" 'You care what they'll do when they remember that you're the one with personality.'
" 'Is it okay if I have a say over what I want?' I asked.
" 'That's the problem, Frankie. Once you start hanging out with them, they don't give you a say.'
" 'You just want me to be like you,' I shouted.
" 'You are like me. Get used to it,' she shouted back.
"My father would go around and shut all the windows in the kitchen so the neighbors couldn't hear us shouting, but Mia and I would go at it until I backed down or my dad would say, 'Mia, she's a kid. Couldn't you let her win for once?'
"But it was never in Mia's makeup to back down.
" 'Is that what you want, Frankie? That I let you win?'
"Yes, I'd want to scream. Just once, let me win.
"We'd go to bed furious with each other and then she'd wake me in the middle of the night and come and lie on my bed and we'd talk for hours, about nothing and everything and she'd let me touch the scars on her stomach; the scars from where they cut me out of her."

But something has happened to Mia, who unexpectedly fails to get up one morning.

"Luca and I wait for my dad at the front door because my mother never stays in bed, even if she has a temperature over 104 degrees. But today the Mia we all know disappears and she becomes someone with nothing to say.
"Someone a bit like me."

Morning after morning thereafter, as Francesca heads out to face her classes, her friends, and the complications that arise from being one of thirty girls in a school with 750 guys, Mia remains shut up in her bedroom. Her dad, "Bob the Builder," a modest and content guy who got to marry his childhood sweetheart, works to neatly plaster over the problem.

Meanwhile, as the rising tides of crisis come crashing in on her family, Francesca's suddenly playing catch-me-if-you-can with the undertow of her hormones.

"Mia's everything has consumed us all our lives and now Mia's nothing is consuming us as well."

Francesca Spinelli's story is so intimate, so emotionally revealing that it sometimes takes on an almost voyeuristic quality.

"We watch in silence, but I look at the others' faces. All of them glued to the screen, a dreamy look on their faces. A hint of a smile on their lips. A sense of hope. They're all the same. Cynical Tara, couldn't-give-a-shit Siobhan, romantic Justine. "And I want to cry. Because my face looks just like theirs and I haven't felt like anyone else since I was in Year Seven and Siobhan Sullivan and I did the Macarena in the foyer of the chapel and got lunchtime detention for a week.
"Justine catches me looking and she smiles, and with tears in my eyes I smile back."

Searching to find her own voice, while groping for some key that might help lead her mother back from the abyss, Francesca Spinelli is one heck of a character in one masterfully written book. Turning on a dime, from the emotional, to the revealing, to the laugh-out-loud hilarious, SAVING FRANCESCA is a book that is not to be missed.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com ( )

Summary: Francesca goes to a formerly all-boys private school where the only thing co-ed is the fact that girls get their own bathroom. But that’s not even her biggest problem—why does her usually peppy mom refuse to get out of bed?

Review: Ah, I could read Melina Marchetta’s books all day, every day. I loved Jellicoe Road more than this book, but I still adored Francesca’s story.

This woman should teach a class in writing dialogue, if she doesn’t already. The dialogue she writes is clever without being pretentious. And funny. Actually, forget being jealous of how the author writes the dialogue, I’m jealous of how these kids speak. If I could be that quick with a comeback, I would be the coolest ever.

Another thing I loved is how Francesca has guy friends who aren’t interested in her romantically. They’re just really, truly her friends.

Finally, a little taste for you. A boy named Will put the moves on Francesca, and she confronts him about it:

“I don’t want you to think I do that all the time,” he says, sounding a bit strained.

He’s very stressed. I have caused that stress. I am jubilant that I have caused that stress.

“Why would I think otherwise?”

“Because,” he says.

Because?

“Don’t you do legal studies? Aren’t you in mock trial? Does the argument ‘because’ usually work for you?”

He doesn’t even have the decency to be shifty-eyed. He just stares straight at me.

“You were drunk, Will,” I say after a moment. “I wouldn’t expect you to even remember anything.” I turn to go.

“If I was sober, you would have been impressed,” he says, repeating my words from that night.

“But you weren’t. And I’m not,” I say firmly. “And if you think that I am praying at night for you to ask me out, just dream on.”

I walk away, so proud of myself that I can hardly contain it.

***

Dear God, please please please let Will Trombal split up with his girlfriend and ask me out.

The prayer becomes my mantra all night. ( )

This was definitely chick lit, but it was a lot deeper than most chick lit, due to Francesca's mother's depression (which, as as fellow-depressive, I thought was realistically depicted). The story was believable and not over-the-top at all, just the trials and tribulations of an ordinary Australian teenage girl. The stuff about Italian-Australian culture added spice. ( )