When she is at home recovering, her brother Zooey talks with her about their smarts, emotional traumas and problems with the world.Īdam Farmer learns that nothing in his life is what it seems: his identity, his past, and even his future. Franny visits her college boyfriend and tells him about the phoniness of her college experience, ultimately having a nervous breakdown. In interwoven short stories, Salinger tells the tales of Franny and Zooey, two precocious members of the eccentric and brilliant Glass family. While she first enjoys the cache of being Matthew’s girlfriend, Frankie soon finds herself frustrated with the school’s social pecking order and Matthew’s condescension (he pedantically corrects her jokes), and the discovery that Matthew is part of the Loyal Order of the Bassett Hounds, the school’s secret, all-male society that once boasted her father as a member, Frankie is spurred to action.
She catches the eye of Matthew Livingston, the school’s rich and beautiful golden boy. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banksĭuring the summer after freshman year, the titular Frankie Landau-Banks has a transformation and returns to her elite boarding school as a gorgeous, clever sophomore. To deal with the breakup, he agrees to go on a road trip with his best friend Hassan and spends the summer in the rural south, trying to create a mathematic equation for explaining his tragic love life. He’s also coping with being dumped for the 19th time by a girl named Katherine. With wit and humor, he tells the story of his struggle to adapt and the difficulties he faces as his life at home starts to crumble.Ĭolin Singleton was a child prodigy, but when the story begins, he is 18 and merely very, very smart and good with anagrams. At his teacher’s urging, he transfers to a white school and finds himself an outcast in the Indian community and a strange newcomer in the white community. This National Book Award winning novel is the story of Arnold, a smart, low-achieving and incredibly sarcastic teenager living on the Spokane Indian reservation. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, you’ll enjoy these books, too!