Customer Reviews

Pish Posh

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Clara Frankofile is a snobby, rich, eleven year old girl who lives in a luxurious penthouse in New York City that is loaded with every thing she could possibly want. What is missing from this glamorous life are the love and care of her parents, who live in a different apartment and don't even care where she is. When Clara kicks Dr. Piff out of her family's posh restaurant, it uncovers a mystery that will change the way she lives forever!

I read this book with my Mother-Daughter Book Club. Most of the girls in the club are the same age as Clara. We enjoyed this book very much! It is a fictional story with a mystery woven into it. Even the moms liked this book! It had some excellent ideas that could be discussed with the group. We highly recommend it.

Pish Posh by Ellen Potter is a great book and definitely worth reading. 11-year-old Clara Frankofile has everything you could ever want. She's super rich, has her own apartment (it's more convenient for her parents) with a roller coaster, bumper carts, and anything else you could think of. (It's too long to list all of the things she has!) To put that in shorter words Clara is spoiled to the bone. With her parents owning the famous restaurant Pish Posh, Clara in her spare time loves spotting out celebrities that have become "Nobodies" and enjoys kicking them to the curb. Pish Posh is a great book, and if you decide to read it you will go on an amazing and mysterious journey solving clues along the way. A definite page-turner.

What a wonderful book.
It is perfect for pre-teens. They fantasize about superpower to deal with their problems. Ms. Potter gives us Clara Frankofile - a social snob - as her heroine [it's all right, she turns out all right in the end]. Clara not only fantasizes about power. She actually gets to use it. Scanning people entering her parents' posh restaurant, Clara intuits who among them no longer retain their social credentials and banishes them from the restaurant. Variations on this theme, plus adventures with a young thief as a side-kick to solve a mystery will keep the reader's interest from start to finish. It is not only a satire on social pretensions, but it's pretty funny too.

Pish Posh is the place to be in New York City. Superstars and wannabes dine at the aptly named restaurant, craving attention and enjoying the fabulous food. Each person secretly hopes that he or she will not be deemed the next Nobody, and everyone there fears the person who would deliver that verdict: an eleven year old little girl.

Clara Frankofile, daughter of the Pish Posh owners and chef, wears a black dress everyday (she has hundreds of the same outfit) and looks down on people through her tinted sunglasses. What she says goes. An actress who walked in as the It Girl may be declared a Nobody before she is done with her meal.

Though I like Ellen Potter's Olivia Kidney series, I found myself wanting more from Pish Posh than I ultimately got. It begins as a sarcastic take on society and celebrity, which I liked, but the focus changed not once but twice before the story was through. Based on the jacket summary, I thought I was in for a cross between the book So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld and the film To Catch a Thief, as Clara befriends a girl barely older than her who is a jewel thief. It then became a story about past lives, in a way. I won't spoil the ending, but I will say it fell a little short of my expectations. Still, Potter delivers descriptive and funny writing, and I'll certainly continue to pick up her novels.

Our mother/daughter book group of 5th grade girls read this book and loved it. I should say, the girls loved it. The mothers had a little trouble getting into the whole fantasy aspect of it, but we all liked the book's humor. We had a lively discussion about it and the girls were all transported into the magical world of the main character.

I read this book because my 8 yr old (advanced reader) was drawn in by the cover and wanted to read it. I didn't let her: I never saw it coming, but the climax of the book was too brutal for her. (A man is hanged - and it's described - because of a false accusation made by a woman who had started to fall in love with him. She realizes he didn't do it as she sees him being hanged.)

The hanging scene also seems a bit incongruous with the rest of the book, which doesn't take itself too seriously and has a much lighter tone.

The rest of the book was mostly good fun for kids. The main character has her own apartment (at age 11), with various fantasy rooms (a beach room with real waves and sand, a tree climbing room with a real tree, etc.). She wields a great deal of power in the adult world, wearing dark sunglasses and black dresses as she decides who to ban from her parents' restaurant. She meets a girl her age who is a professional thief, likewise powerful and very competent. The two of them find themselves drawn into friendship. Their bad behavior has only emotional consequences (i.e. guilt). Still, I found this book to be an enjoyable flight of fantasy, a power trip for kids.

[...]
This book has got the cutest cover I have seen in a long time!
Clara Frankofile is everything that you would think a pre-teen, Manhattanite snob would be. Daughter of famous restauranteur Pierre and socialite Lila, Clara spends every evening dining alone at the back of Pish Posh and spends her time deciding who has become a Nobody. Pish Posh simply wouldn't be the elegant place it is if they let anyone in!
The times when Clara is not in the restaurant, she is spending time in her own apartment...her parents live in the apartment below her. It's more convenient that way. Clara has everything she could wish for there...a roller coaster room, a Brooklyn neighbourhood room, bumper car room. Her favourite room, however, houses a massive tree from Yungaburra Australia.
After banishing Dr. Piff from Pish Posh, Clara ends up in her tree room. She has just opened the ceiling hatch and is sitting in the branches when she notices a ruckus on the street below. Everyone seems to be pointing to her rooftop. Upon squinting down, Clara notices a girl about her age looking for an escape. Against her better judgement, Clara helps the girl up into the tree and closes the hatch.
Enter Annabelle. Plain, assertive and a thief, Annabelle is not like the people with whom Clara tends to associate, let alone someone who she would befriend. But life has a funny way of taking twists and turns and sometimes you end up in places you would never imagine.
Pish Posh is part adventure, part fantasy, and part friendship fiction. There are many levels to the story, and each, I am happy to say, is delightful as well as thoughtful. It is a NYC-centric story, but I think that the tween set will love it no matter where they live!

It took me awhile to warm up to the equally precocious pre-teen featured in Pish Posh. True, Clara Frankofile is different from the norm, but she is also a perfectionist snob. She wears dark glasses and a black dress (of which she owns one-hundred and fifty-seven copies), sits at a little round table in the back of the Pish Posh restaurant, and dines on a tuna-fish sandwich cut into four perfect squares. The latter doesn't sound too bad, but I don't like that "she gazed around the room with sharp, assessing eyes". Nor do I like that Clara felt that her classmates were all astonishingly stupid. Last, I hate that because Clara's parents won the restaurant, Clara can a patron "has become a Nobody" and then ask them to leave and never return. My favorite scene is the conversation that transpires between Clara and Dr. Piff after she calls him a "Nobody". While he admits that she has cunning eyes, he also informs her: "And yet, you have failed to notice a most particular and mysterious thing that is happening right under your nose." This announcement rankles Clara, who in her arrogance thinks she knows everything. To her dismay, she eventually discovers that Dr. Piff is correct. I enjoyed seeing Clara frustrated. Remember though that Clara likes tuna-fish sandwiches. She also likes roller coasters, cotton candy, and beach sand. Moreover, in the quiet of her apartment floor (the family owns two floors of a high-rise apartment), Clara likes to wears overalls and a straw hat. This elegant girl is not as proper and prim as she wants everyone to think. When a girl about her age gets caught stealing on her floor, Clara finds herself craving danger and even covers for the thief who is named Annabel. There is sweetness to the relationship that develops between these two girls, as they make choices about their future and who they really want to be. I also liked the mystery that unfolded, as Clara tries to figure out what secrets are happening under her nose. Last, I was impressed with how Ellen Potter could introduce a somewhat unlikeable character but then turn her into an endearing fun kid.

The book I am reviewing is Pish Posh. It is by Ellen Potter. I think this book deserves five stars because the author wrote this book with good details. This book is about an eleven year old girl named Clara Fronkofile. A problem that occurs in this story is that she tells a guy named Dr. Piff to leave the restaurant Pish Posh because he is not a somebody anymore. He says that something mysterious is happening right under her nose... I recommend this book to someone who likes mysteries. If you want to find out the ending read this book.

I enjoy reading mysteries, so I decided to read this book. I didn't like it very much. The main character, Clara Frankofile, is a snobby, bratty girl who sits at the back of her parents restaurant who scouts out "Nobodies". At the same time, there is a mystery under her nose. Many parts don't make very much sense. For instance, Clara's apartment has many rooms such as a State Fair Room, with a real roller coaster. She also meets a girl named Annabelle who is a jewel thief.
You probably should give this book a chance, but it just wasn't my kind of book.