Frankie
Finnegan, or Faraway Frankie as he is sometimes known, is a boy who retreats
from the harsh struggles of day-to-day life into daydreaming, adept at turning
the bullies' insults and cruelty into a joke so that he can laugh along. [see also: Beside The Sea, the dirt-cheap ebook version of the short story that led to Faraway]
Frankie
Finnegan, or Faraway Frankie as he is sometimes known, is a boy who retreats
from the harsh struggles of day-to-day life into daydreaming, adept at turning
the bullies' insults and cruelty into a joke so that he can laugh along.
To cope with the pressure, he turns inwards: he has a most vivid -- and sometimes disturbing -- imagination, and telling tall tales is one of his ways of coping. Everyone is accustomed to his flights of fancy, and his occasional lapses when he forgets the boundaries between his dream world and the real one. But then... as Frankie's humiliations mount up, more and more elements from his faraway fantasy world start to appear in the real one. Can he use his imaginary world to escape? Can he learn how to construct the world around him from his dreams, and so get some kind of control over his life?
But when power goes to your head, and your head is where the world comes from, that's a very dangerous mix.
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"Some writers write exclusively for adults; some exclusively for children; but the most enduring works of literature - from Robinson Crusoe to Le Guin's Earthsea, from Pilgrim's Progress to Tolkien, from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter - are loved by children and adults alike. This, I'd say, is the hardest writerly discipline of all to master: to write a book that surpasses the tendency to categorise literature into 'young adult' and 'old adult' categories. Keith Brooke's The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie is a masterclass in how to transcend those sorts of labels. It is wiser about youth and imagination than most other novels published today; and everybody, of whatever age, should read it...
"The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie is not only a marvelously compelling exploration of a fantastical world, but a meditation upon the nature of fiction itself...
"It is (and I handle this Hollywood cliché with tongs, although it is appropriate here) the journey Frankie travels that makes this short novel one of the best things Brooke has ever written."
Published by Newcon Press, April 2010.
The Guardian described it as "an accomplished coming-of-age story that balances the real and the surreal to great effect".
D Douglas Fratz at SF Site said, "Although ostensively a book for teen readers, Faraway Frankie is actually more likely to appeal to adult readers who remember what it felt like to be an uncomfortable teen, and can appreciate its subtleties and deliberate pacing... adult fantasy readers [should] obtain and read this special signed limited edition before it sells out. The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie is one of the best short novels of childhood you will read this year."
Tony Ballantyne liked it too: "This is an elegant little gem of a book: unsettling, funny and exciting in equal measure ... by the seriously underrated Keith Brooke. Recommended."
Good Reads said: "This could have been an overly moralistic or schmaltzy piece of fiction, but Brooke grounds his fantasy in reality and makes the story pertinent to each and every one of us. The prose is intelligently descriptive throughout, with interesting twists and turns, short chapters which kept me turning the pages, and a told in a deceptively easy style... Highly recommended for those who enjoy intelligent fantasy. This is a very British book."
On his blog, Adam Roberts went on to say: "My contributor copies for this title arrived from Ian Whates' Newcon Press last week (I wrote the short introduction). It's an excellent novel too; certainly one of the very best things this talented author has yet done. If you know what's good for you, you'll want to buy a copy, although the title's amazon page says 'Temporarily out of stock'. I hope because they've sold out, but probably it's because they won't order any in until people start buying it ... so what are you waiting for?"
#
This is a story that appeared years ago in a short-lived magazine called Beyond. When I came to write The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie I'd all but forgotten the original story, but it clearly lingered: the strange seaside town in a pocket outside normal reality, the ability to recast reality around you, even a protagonist called Frankie...
Newcon Press have brought this story out as a short ebook selling on Amazon for less than a pound and, as always, they've done a lovely job.
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Eric Brown, on the story that (I belatedly realised) developed into The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie: "I have read 'Beside the Sea' perhaps four or five times since its original publication in the short-lived British SF magazine Beyond. It is a magical fantasy, a parable in the form of a rite-of-passage story, both frightening and bizarre, about the fear of change: it's a tirade against conformity at once unsettling and, in its moving last paragraph, beautifully optimistic. It's a story I come back to again and again, and one which I wish I had written myself - and there can be no greater recommendation than that."