Miss Kansas City

by Joan Frank

Miss Kansas City is the story of an improbable friendship, set in the tumultuous mid-80s dotcom California, where youthful greed and blinkered innocence arrive intertwined.

Friendless and reclusive, Alex Blue commutes two hours each way to a job that serves mainly as a place to bide time, until one day she meets the wealthy, worldly--and married--owner of a high-concept Bay Area lifestyle company. Meanwhile, the melancholy and closeted...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472115758
• ISBN13: 9780472115754
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Fine, Fine, Fine

Joan Frank's first novel, Miss Kansas City (a wonderfully ironic title), is a masterpiece. I read her award-winning short story collection, Boys Keep Being Born, and loved her writing so much that I've been waiting for another book from her. Now, with this one, I am even more awed at her range. Along with the drama of love and loss and resilience (that quality - that almost infinite adaptability - which, uniquely, makes us human), she leaves us with a wealth of insight and of wisdom. She's wonderfully good at delineating what she calls the "unconscious male" (in spite of her love for those pesky trouble-makers). Yet she allows us into the inner spaces of both her male and female characters, each caught up in love (or obsession) and yearning. She opens us up to the gulf of loneliness within each isolated sex. She keeps us on our toes, surprises us. Then, reaching beyond the personal, she gives us wholly believable scenes of California's takeoff into its heady new computerized world, along with, already, intimations of its collapse. She's the true chronicler of our twentieth-century nation-state and of the human soul.