I have to admit that when I started Saving Francesca I did have to remind myself that this wasn’t Josie Alibrandi’s story, and at first that was hard because the similarities between the books are there – Italian family, strong mother, strong daughter, Catholic Education System and the search for self – but it became easier as I went on because Marchetta’s writing has matured since she wrote the Australian ‘classic’ Looking for Alibrandi. Saving Francesca is more confident and consistent in its style, and reassures the reader that Marchetta will deliver all she promises of her characters and their experiences.

Francesca Spinelli is in the first Year Eleven intake of girls at an all boys Catholic School.  She has been sent there by her mother, a university lecturer in Communications, to get a better education than the one offered by the local all-girl Catholic school. Forced out of her ‘complacent’ niche at St Stella’s and into a new zone at St Sebastian’s – she’s not happy. 

It’s Thursday afternoon, and we have sport. These are the choices for the girls: watching an invitation cricket game; study in one of the classrooms; or watching the senior Rugby League. As you can imagine, I’m torn.

School is not the only thing she hates about her life. Her mother is in the middle of a nervous break down, her family seems to be crumbling around her, she doesn’t know who she is and she thinks she’s falling in love with a prefect she loathes.  Marchetta quickly establishes Franscesca’s dry, understated, and, ironic tone and uses it to deftly narrate the many layers of reality and tangles of issues which Francesca and her school friends are facing. 

Since the publication of Looking for Alibrandi, more than a decade ago, Marchetta has been a devoted, and one imagines, a highly effective secondary English teacher in a Catholic boys’ school in NSW.   As well as using this time to brew a good story, she’s mined her experiences well.  Her observations about gender politics in classrooms are sharp and her inside knowledge of the way schools work is accurate.  Her insights into how girls can frame and manipulate each other within friendship groups are true to wincing-point and her sense of the ridiculous is delightfully unencumbered.  More-over, the framework of parallel journeys she sets up for her characters, which could have seemed an obvious device in less capable hands, works very convincingly.

In Looking for Alibrandi she showed us she could get inside the head of a teenage school-girl.  In Saving Francesca she shows us she can do an equally good job at portraying the feelings and actions of boys as well.  Her characters emerge from their initial sketchy stereotypes to become rich mixtures of dependable and mercuric, understandable and unfathomable traits.  This book will do much to help teenagers understand themselves and their friends, and remind parents that they too were teenagers once.

I read a review recently which said ‘I hope we don’t have to wait eleven years until her next book’.  Well eleven years is a long time between drinks, but I don’t mind waiting for quality – and I don’t think I could settle for anything less now.  Highly recommended

Other books by this author:
Looking for Alibrandi (Penguin, 1992)

Review by Sarah Mayor Cox

© 2003 Sarah Mayor Cox