Frankie was one of those decent reads that I enjoyed... but it just didn’t grab me completely. I liked that the characters were unique and distinctive but to be honest, I never really connected to any of them. We got about five seconds with Xavier before he disappeared so he was kind of just this assumed figure hovering over the plot. I could understand why Frankie cared about him but I never felt it for myself. The same with Nate, her best friend (whose name escaping me at the moment), Nonna and the other secondary characters. Only Vinnie, Frankie’s aunt and guardian, was a stand out. She exactly the sort of woman that someone like Frankie needed in her life. She was strong but fair. She was funny and sweet. She completely stole the show.

The plotline itself was a little frustrating. I’m not a big fan of the trope where teenagers investigate crimes without the help of the police/adults. It’s generally unrealistic and frustrating, but this one did have a purpose: to show the bias of the police towards low socioeconomic areas. I liked that aspect of it, I did. It was just thought that there was so much effort taken to set these characters and the setting apart from other YA books that it seemed a little bit of a waste to use such boring tropes. I also thought that aspects of the ending were rather predictable… which made it rather anti-climatic. Oh, and the romance didn’t work for me completely either. I wasn’t a massive Nate fan - they hated each other 95% of the time, but then they were kissing? It was just another layer of the story that I felt was trope-y and slightly boring.

The writing style was okay but it was also a little blunt - in a way that didn’t work for me. Like a lot of reviewers before me are saying, the author relied on pop culture references to describe people - which is something that I cannot stand. The reason this is the worst possible way to describe someone is that I literally didn’t recognise any of the names she mentioned, literally any of them! I wasn’t even sure whether they were meant to be real celebrities or made-up ones… so you can imagine the struggle when a character is described as “Blah Blah and Blah Blah’s love child”. If I don’t know who that person is then how am I meant to know what that person looks like? It just feels like lazy writing when it happens multiple times.

Overall? I didn’t think was necessarily a ‘bad book’ but it certainly wasn’t for me. The characters weren’t my favourite and the plotline took a direction that I wasn’t completely into. The romance felt unnecessary and the the ending was ultimately anticlimactic. I will try more of this author’s work in the future but I was not the biggest fan of Frankie.