The protagonist of Lynda Stephenson’s novel "The Southern Chapter of the Big Girl Panties Club" is a sometimes sassy, sometimes sarcastic, and always unpredictable sixteen-year-old girl from Clover, Texas, named Frankilee Baxter. The story opens in 1958 on the first day of freshman orientation at Athena, a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of San Antonio. From the beginning, Frankilee knows that her freshman year at Athena will be history-making because a Negro student has enrolled there for the first time ever. Frankilee is curious about Eleanor Wilson, whose father is a northern minister and prominent leader in the NAACP, but she is initially more concerned about growing breasts, pledging a sorority, getting a boyfriend and joining the campus newspaper than she is about the Civil Rights Movement and integration. In a moment of pique after her rather dumpy, unattractive roommate Pickles is not asked to join any of the campus sororities, Frankilee forms an independent sorority with Pickles and Sty, their other roommate. Frankilee dubs the newly formed sisterhood the Big Girl Panties Club (BGPC) because her grandmother always told her to put her big girl panties on and deal with things whenever Frankilee complained about life’s injustices. Soon, the membership of the BGPC increases to include Eleanor and her roommate Wanda after Frankilee realizes that they are being ostracized by the rest of the student body. When social ostracism gives way to menacing harassment, Frankilee finds herself caught between what is right and what is easy. The pace of the novel picks up as the year progresses and Frankilee begins sussing out the truth behind several mysteries. "The Southern Chapter of the Big Girl Panties Club" is at its heart a coming of age story. Forced to confront prejudice and bigotry on a number of fronts—the Hick-from-the-Sticks image of small-town girls; the assumption that college coeds are only interested in getting an M.R.S. degree and will not need or want careers of their own; the sexual double standard; racism and anti-Semitism—Frankilee struggles with her own hypocrisy, recognizing that she cannot always swim against the current even with the best of intentions. At times Frankilee is hot tempered and outspoken. Her thoughts are often interspersed with corny interjections like "Mercy Maud!", "Good gadfry!" and "Ye gods and goldfish!" Dazzled by a handsome upperclassman named Trace Godfrey, Frankilee is repeatedly torn between her physical attraction to him and her intellectual revulsion of his violent behavior and bigoted attitudes. A reader who was not a teenager in the 1950s may well want to strangle Frankilee each time she talks herself out of dumping Trace or find it odd that an aspiring career woman would be happy to do her college boyfriend’s homework, but in many ways Frankilee is a protagonist readers will be able to relate to whether they grew up in the 1950s or later. Whether we like it or not, we all have a little Frankilee Baxter in us.
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