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Summary and Reviews of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

by E Lockhart
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Readers' Rating (3):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 25, 2008, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2009, 352 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16: No longer the kind of girl to take "no" for an answer and possibly a criminal mastermind. This is the story of how she got that way.

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14: Debate Club. Her father's "bunny rabbit." A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.

Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston.

Frankie Landau-Banks. No longer the kind of girl to take "no" for an answer. Especially when "no" means she's excluded from her boyfriend's all-male secret society. Not when her ex-boyfriend shows up in the strangest of places. Not when she knows she's smarter than any of them. When she knows Matthew's lying to her. And when there are so many, many pranks to be done.

Frankie Landau-Banks, at age 16: Possibly a criminal mastermind.

This is the story of how she got that way.

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Reviews

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Lockhart has a sensitive ear for her characters' young voices; the dialogue is funny and real. Young women will savor this subversive cautionary tale of a girl geek's exhilarating pursuit of power -- sexual, intellectual, and social -- within the retrograde, male-dominated world of an elite boarding school...continued

Full Review (529 words)

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(Reviewed by Jo Perry).

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Beyond the Book



Theory of Surveillance: The Panopticon

The Panopticon was proposed as a model prison by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a Utilitarian philosopher and theorist of British legal reform.

The Panopticon ("all-seeing") functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know when he was being surveilled.

Instead of traditional 'cellblock' designs, many modern prisons are built in a 'podular' design influenced by Bentham's Panopticon. Instead of rectangular buildings with tiers of cells and walkways, modern prisons are often constructed in triangular or trapezoidal-shapes with the cells...

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Read-Alikes

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