Home > Frindle Summary & Study Guide

Frindle | Introduction

Frindle is a terrific romp and reads almost like a contemporary fable or fairy tale in its simplicity. A boy too creative for the confines of elementary school meets his match in an extremely exacting teacher. They square off in an epic battle over…an invented word?

Yes. The title comes from "frindle," the word for "pen" that young Nick Allen thinks up when he is trying to avoid working for Mrs. Granger, his fifth grade language arts teacher. Both of them are classic types—Nick is a smart and rebellious kid who just wants to be free, while the legendary Mrs. Granger is the terrifyingly strict. Despite their seeming stereotypes, each character is far more complex.

What Fridle becomes, finally, is a story about how school, language, family, and even society as a whole exercise power and the various roles individuals play within a power structure. Some rebel, some oppress, some are ignorant of their role in the larger game, and some are completely aware. There is a tug of war back and forth over who will control everything, and it all comes down to what you call a frindle.

Frindle Summary

The first chapter of Frindle describes Nick Allen's first acts of creative rebellion. Chapter One tells how he transformed Mrs. Deaver's third grade classroom into a tropical paradise, complete with sand, and how he disrupted Mrs. Avery's fourth grade class by chirping like a red-winged blackbird. These experiences set up the expectation that Nick will always find a way to get around teachers and their attempts to control the classroom.

However, that all changes in Chapter Two when Nick gets to fifth grade and has Mrs. Granger for language arts. While she was known to have a fine sense of humor, Mrs. Granger is legendary at Lincoln Elementary for three things: her strictness, her high standards, and her love of language. She sends a letter to all parents letting them know they had to have a good dictionary at home. While the other teachers start the school year by just letting the kids chat, Mrs. Granger puts them to work right away. Nick tries to disrupt the first class by asking a "thought-grenade" question about where all the words in the dictionary come from, only to have it backfire when Mrs. Granger assigns him an oral report on the subject.

While researching where words come from, Nick hatches a new plan to disrupt class. He makes his report extra long and incorporates reading a tough article from the dictionary out loud, thus whiling away most of the class period. Mrs. Granger eventually shuts him down, but Nick tries to disrupt things again by asking who decides which words mean what. Mrs. Granger tells Nick that he does—that people do.

This sparks another rebellion. As Nick is walking with his friend Janet... » Complete Frindle Summary