Literary agent for children's books
LAURA CECIL
FLYING FOR FRANKIE by Pauline Fisk
Age range: 12 plus
'The view from the basket was awesome...According to Grey-Eyes we were travelling at considerable speed, carried by a steady breeze. This confused me. It didn’t feel like speed to me. Everything up here seemed so still and calm. We hardly seemed to be moving.
Grey-Eyes smiled as if he understood why I might be confused.
“Just because you can’t see the wind, it doesn’t mean to say it isn’t here,” he said. “It’s just that, travelling as we are, we’ve become a part of it. Think about it for a minute. If we were stationary, we’d feel the full force of the wind buffeting against us. But, because we‘re moving with it, there’s nothing to feel. In the heart of the wind, we’re perfectly still.”
I’ll always remember those words. Sometimes things get said that really strike you, and that was one of those occasions. Frankie’s illness was like a wind, I suddenly thought. We were all being swept along by it, and yet we’d found this place of stillness at its heart.'
Frankie Bradley and Charis Watts are unlikely friends with very contrasting backgrounds: Frankie comes from a rich and successful family, Charis from a modest and dysfunctional one. But when they discover the same secret place on Dartmouth estuary a friendship begins bound by a shared humour and imagination. Together they create a secret world with its own language and life seems mesmiritious - meaning as good as anything could ever get. Then confident, beautiful Frankie is diagnosed with cancer and Charis finds she has to support the friend who she has always seen as the stronger one in their relationship.
As well as terminal illness, Pauline Fisk's novel is also about teenage aspirations, family life, failure and success. Most of all this is a story about friendship and Charis, who wants to do something to celebrate her best friend's life, and do it now while she’s still alive.
Rights :
Translation Laura Cecil
US: Faber & Faber
Publishers:
UK: Faber & Faber
Spain : Montena
"Obviously, this is a difficult subject, but it also can be funny if handled rightly. It’s full of bravery, cowardice, misapprehensions, jokes, tears, and laughter
in the face of death, because what else have we got? Though not wishing in anyway to be unrealistic about the dying process, I do not see this as a mournful or overly sentimental story."
Pauline Fisk