Freedom Train (review)

As the baby of the family, Frankie bristles at being everyone's "bunny," protected at her posh boarding school by her older sister, but mostly ignored or not taken seriously. In between her freshman and sophomore year, however, she acquires some assets (read: breasts) and puts them to good use back at school to lock in a senior boyfriend and become part of the school's coveted inner circle. She is frustrated, however, that her boyfriend Matthew won't trust her enough to talk about his involvement with the school's secret society, and that her hold on him isn't as strong as that of the alpha male, aptly named Alpha, who competes with her for Matthew's time and attention. Putting together clues from her father's drunken reminiscences with old school chums, she uncovers some of the society's secrets, and she sets out to be its covert head, using Alpha's arrogance against him to accomplish her own behind-the-scenes power plays and up the ante on their anemic pranks. A certain arch quality to the narration that occasionally slips into a Twilight Zone-like voiceover creates a detached tone of inevitability to Frankie's rise and eventual fall; as a girl in this boys' club, she is fated to accept either anonymity or ignominy. Her choice marks Frankie as a character we rarely meet in YA fiction—an older version of Cynthia Voigt's Bad Girls, a young woman for whom power trumps romance and even friendship, who leads with her head and not her hormones, and who is as calculating as she is intelligent. There are thus subtle and evocative connections to be drawn here between this and power explorations such as Cormier's The Chocolate War, nuances of gender and power with disturbing implications, even though Frankie's story is decidedly more light-hearted than Jerry Renault's.