'Frankie believed in Heaven quite literally, as if it was another lovely world out past the stars. And when he spoke the word "love", it seemed to spring free and fly into the air like a beautiful balloon you wanted to run after. But I couldn't tell my parents about Frankie, not properly. I told them I'd made friends with the boy in the room next to mine, and how he'd come from this little town out west. I couldn't tell them how he was becoming the best thing in my world. I couldn't tell anyone, I hardly admitted it to myself.'
'In the 1950s, 'entering' the seminary was for ever, and young boys were gathered into the priesthood before they were old enough to know what they would lose. Tom went to St Finbar's because he was looking for something more than the ordinary happiness of his home and school.
'But then he discovered that being able to love another person was the most important thing of all. For Tom, loving Frankie made him part of the world. Even when Frankie was gone...' (Synopsis)
Teachers notes from publisher’s website.
'In My Lovely Frankie, the acclaimed YA writer Judith Clarke’s latest novel, Tom Rowland is 16 years old in the 1950s when he has a religious epiphany of sorts. He’s so struck that he defies the wishes of his loving but not terribly observant parents and enrols at St Finbar’s, a seminary on the coast. It’s hellish. Tom is lonely and homesick until he meets the boy in the cell next door, Frankie Maguire, who has been forced to the seminary after his fundamentalist parents catch him having sex (through no fault of his own). Tom falls for the tortured Frankie, causing a swirl of emotions around his relationship with God and Catholicism, his sexuality and his future as a priest.' (Introduction)
'In My Lovely Frankie, the acclaimed YA writer Judith Clarke’s latest novel, Tom Rowland is 16 years old in the 1950s when he has a religious epiphany of sorts. He’s so struck that he defies the wishes of his loving but not terribly observant parents and enrols at St Finbar’s, a seminary on the coast. It’s hellish. Tom is lonely and homesick until he meets the boy in the cell next door, Frankie Maguire, who has been forced to the seminary after his fundamentalist parents catch him having sex (through no fault of his own). Tom falls for the tortured Frankie, causing a swirl of emotions around his relationship with God and Catholicism, his sexuality and his future as a priest.' (Introduction)
