FRANNIE IN PIECES

The world is full of things that can kill you, and 15-year-old Frannie knows this. She’s become intensely aware of the dangers around her ever since she found her father, dead from a heart attack on his bathroom floor. When she finds an elaborate homemade puzzle labeled “Frances Anne 1000” while cleaning out his home, she becomes convinced that putting it together will somehow connect her back to him. Ephron tells her story leisurely, allowing Frannie to move back and forth between the present-tense narrative of her grief and her recollections of life with her artist father, both before and after her parents’ divorce, weaving in subplots and complications both funny and revealing in conscious emulation of a jigsaw puzzle. So deliberate is the exposition that the introduction of Frannie’s magical ability to enter the puzzle as she works it comes something as a surprise, appearing as it does more than one-third of the way through the book, and clashes with the everyday realism that has preceded it. Frannie’s response to her situation rings emotionally true, however, and readers will enjoy the time they spend with her. (Fiction. 12+)