I started grabbing everything I could find and I had no idea what other people thought was good or what was important. And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was. Every single thing that you loved became the source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.
― Kevin Wilson, Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Frankie is a sixteen-year-old girl with three feral older brothers (the triplets), a mom who is recovering from a brutal divorce, and the hope that one day she will get out of her small, southern town and discover that she is more than a quiet, plain girl with no friends.
Not knowing Frankie is an outcast, the new kid Zeke asks to hang out and they start spending all day at Frankie’s house watching TV, eating junk food, and trying to figure out how to fill the dead hours while Frankie’s mom is at work.
After a week of getting to know one another, Zeke and Frankie confess what they really want to do, what they dream of becoming. Zeke wants to be an artist. Frankie wants to be a novelist. In secret, they begin working on their projects together, side-by-side, sprawled out in Frankie’s house.
Together, they combine their skills and design a poster. Their poster is weird and creepy and enigmatic and they decide to make copies of it using an old copier that Frankie’s delinquent brothers stole and hid in the garage. They spend a euphoric night hanging them around town as their own private guerilla art project. No one knows where the posters came from and, since no one really pays attention to Zeke or Frankie in the first place, the two of them make it their mission to put posters up in as many places as possible.
Soon, other people start making and hanging up their own, slightly modified versions of the poster. Rumors start. Rumors that the posters are created by devil worshippers or kidnappers fuel fears of a conspiracy.
Despite the danger, Frankie is compelled to make and hang up even more posters. Things get more and more out of control and Frankie has to decide if she wants people to know it was her, or if she wants to remain anonymous.
This book sucked me in with the setting and with Frankie’s broken, hopeful, fearful, daring, teenage inner monologue. The story, in the end, is irrelevant. The points that brought me utter joy were the callbacks to the feeling of restlessness and anxiety of being trapped in your small, southern town during an interminable summer break.
The setting grabbed me immediately. Frankie and Zeke’s story takes place in 1996 in the small rural town of Coalfield, Tennessee. The description of afternoons at the overcrowded public pool, drinking Ocean Waters at the local Sonic, and driving around aimlessly for hours on end with the air conditioning blasting hit me right in my nostalgic, Xennial heart.
I savored this book. I’ve only read one other book by Kevin Wilson, “Nothing to See Here,” and it stuck with me. Even though I liked that story more than this one, I adored Frankie and her mom and the odd little family they created from the ones that stayed; from the people near them who were there to witness their suffering and their successes.