I'm Frankie Sterne

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Regina poet and fiction writer Dave Margoshes has moved around a bit,
from his beginnings in New York City’s Spanish Harlem, through stints
in New Jersey and California, and, finally, into Canada where he lived
in Calgary and Vancouver before settling in Saskatchewan. His fictional
alter ego, Frankie Sterne, visits all of the above, and more, in his
peripatetic journeys. Not really a novel, I’m Frankie Sterne is more a
finely crafted series of linked stories, some of them published in that
form in literary magazines.

Margoshes has a wonderful ear for nuanced dialogue. Frankie Sterne
(a.k.a. Francesco Stein, aka Frank Stern) is a kind of cross between
Holden Caulfield and (notes another reviewer) Gump of cinematic fame; a
hybrid, wide-eyed cynic who takes a man-child’s view of most events
with which he comes in contact. These events include the 1960s
landmarks: JFK’s assassination, the Cuban revolution, demonstrations
for racial equality and against the Vietnam war.

Frankie is part Jewish, part Puerto Rican. His mother dies in
childbirth; his father, a leftist, jazz-playing postman, distances
himself from family. With a legacy like this, it is not surprising that
the boy is different. “I’ve been hightailing it, highwaying it,
moonlighting it, carrying the word into the countryside, bringing the
message to Mary, laying it on the line, making like Johnny Appleseed,”
he says, explaining as much his means as his reasons for traveling.
Margoshes makes it clear that Frankie’s journey is ultimately one of
growing up.