Fleabrain Loves Franny

1952 was the height of the U.S. polio epidemic. It was also the publication year of Charlotte's Web. These historical details drive Rocklin's animal fantasy, an homage to White's classic. Franny, convalescing from polio, receives a handwritten note from an eloquent flea named Fleabrain. With keen insight into human (and insect) relations, Rocklin creates believable, three-dimensional characters that help anchor the off-the-wall elements. Websites. Bib.

The year 1952 was the height of the polio epidemic in the United States. It was also the publication year of Charlotte's Web. These historical details drive Rocklin's animal fantasy, an homage to White's classic. The book begins at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, where protagonist Franny Katzenback lies stricken with polio. Sister Mary Edberga, an "angel in disguise," reads Charlotte's Web aloud to Franny while an iron lung helps her breathe. After being released from the hospital, and with a lot of convalescing to do, Franny receives a note, written in spindly little letters, from her own Charlotte-esque creature: an eloquent flea named Fleabrain who lives on her dog Alf's tail and who, like Franny, devours books. A fortuitous encounter with some flea powder ("What doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger") gives the Ctenocephalides canis super, er, human strength, and he takes Franny on wondrous nighttime adventures. Franny does slowly regain her strength, but only -- and realistically -- to a point; there's a poignant strand about her reclusive Squirrel Hill neighbor Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine…but no cure. With keen insight into human (and insect) relations, Rocklin creates believable, three-dimensional characters -- Franny's goody-two-shoes older sister, for example, and Franny's old gang of friends, fearful of contagion -- that help anchor the off-the-wall-fantastical elements. And when Fleabrain finds himself before the Commanders of All Nuclei -- i.e., sentient cells, bacteria, and other "wonders of the microworld" -- readers will take up the chant: "SOME FLEA!" elissa gershowitz