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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2008, 352 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2009, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jo Perry
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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.
A Piece of Evidence
December 14, 2007
To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors
Alabaster Preparatory Academy
I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind
the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full
responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order -- including the library
lady, the doggies in the window, night of a thousand dogs, the canned beet
rebellion and the abduction of the guppy.
That is, I wrote the directives telling everyone what to do.
I, and I alone.
No matter what Porter Welsch told you in his statement.
Of course, the dogs of the Order are human beings with free will. They
contributed their labor under no explicit compunction. I did not threaten them
or coerce them in any way, and if they chose to follow my instructions, it was
not because they feared retribution.
You have requested that I provide you with their names. I respectfully decline
to do so. It's not for me to...
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
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(Reviewed by Jo Perry).
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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