Frankie's Place

By: Jim Sterba

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

One summer Jim Sterba, veteran war correspondent, accepts an invitation for a weekend visit from a woman he barely knows, author Frances FitzGerald. He arrives and discovers a secluded little house on the Maine coast, with evergreens and blackberry bushes all around, views of forested mountains, and a fjord full of seabirds and sailboats.

In this Tracy-Hepburn romance, the down-to-earth newspaperman charms the sophisticated New Yorker while their long path to real love has us cheering them on as well as itching for a visit to idyllic Mount Desert Island.

©2003 James Sterba

Critic reviews

"Narrator Christopher Lane does an admirable job....Keeps the tone appealing." (AudioFile)

I read this at our camp

I had no idea what I was about to read, since I first downloaded this is 2005 and never got around to it. I'm sitting at our 'camp' in the Thousand Islands area of New York on a rainy day thinking there's no where else like this. Time for a new book, and out rolls a story so similar to our summer life here. I perked up. All the issues of mice, daily food shopping for dinner, enjoying the outdoors, the boat, the weather, the water, mosquitos...yes, the geology of this granite mounded place. My husband has also spent hours working on his own deer fly-zapper! Like Sterba, we live in a big, congested, busy city which we love for the other half of the year, yet we revel in the the simple life here, rain in the canopy of trees that barely reaches me on the ground, the summer T-storms, the simplicity of life here. We often welcome friends but warn them there's little to do compared to many standard vacation places, and yet we hate leaving. I thoroughly enjoyed this story - is it a little slow? Oh yes, in the best possible way.

Interesting Read

An interesting read, but the author should have “proof listened” before the audio version went out. The narrator’s mispronunciations of Bangor, Fernald, Somes Sound, Nitze, and other names and Maine places drove me crazy. His attempt at a Maine accent was only fair.

Do yourself a favor and skip it

SLOW and boring. If you want to hear a description of someone's life who isn't any more interesting than my own and listen to long descriptions of berry bushes, mussel growth and recited recipes, you'll love the book. Otherwise, don't bother. I've tried 3 times to listen to this book and can't get past 45 minutes. Nothing ever happens and there is no dialog between people. Just long descriptions of island life. It's a two part travelogue. I even ran the book ahead several hours to see if there would more to it and couldn't tell I'd skipped anything.