It's the end of Year 4, and the long summer holidays are stretching ahead.
Ten-year-old Anne Googanstein (nicknamed Frankenstein by the horrible Rodney Picton, but Frankie to her friends) just wants to hang out with her best-friend-forever and state t-ball champion Billy Bloom. But then she finds out that Billy is going away on holiday with his family - leaving Frankie behind to poison their swimming pool and miss him terribly. And what is she going to do about boring Mr Grumble and the school project he has given them about what they want to be when they grow up?
When Frankie meets a real life journalist, the sister of Greg Green, her mother's newish boyfriend, she decides to write and distribute her own newspaper - The Frank Frankie. But a newspaper needs news, so soon Frankie is spying on the resident witch Mrs Nitpik, revealing her family secrets in print to every house in the neighbourhood, and putting up with Ima Hungerford and Rodney Picton - two of the biggest nincompoops ever!
In between, Frankie rescues a neighbour, meets a real-life editor, saves the relationship between her mother and Greg Green, and discovers that some nincompoops make really good friends.
A charming and quirky junior fiction for 7 years and over.