Dylan Hughes always looks on the bright side of things. Sure, his hometown of Manod, Wales, is the rainiest spot in Britain, but it also has the lowest crime rate. Yes, the mountain at the edge of town is the site of a defunct slate quarry, which means the whole mountain, and much of the town, is covered in the uniformly gray color of slate. But, as Dylan says, "All the other mountains around here have grass on the top. Ours is covered in broken slate. Basically they turned the mountain inside out. I mean, how many towns have got an inside-out mountain at the end of the High Street?"
About the only thing that does get Dylan down is that, because there aren't too many jobs in his small Welsh town, everybody seems to be moving away. When his friend Mohan leaves, Dylan is the only boy left in his school, making it pretty darn hard to play a decent game of soccer. He also wishes that his dad, who owns and runs the Snowdonia Oasis gas station, could get a little more business for his garage so that his family doesn't have to worry so much about money.
When a fleet of official-looking vans heads up to the abandoned quarry and sets up camp, Dylan's mom comes up with all sorts of ways to make money off their unexpected out-of-town visitors. From an espresso maker to a newspaper delivery service to a pastry catering business, Dylan's family is soon involved in much more than the auto repair business.
Dylan's sister Minnie is convinced that the mysterious strangers are involved in a secret spy ring. But when their leader, Lester, comes into the gas station and talks to Dylan, he mistakes Dylan's enthusiasm for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with a very different Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael --- the Italian Renaissance artists. It turns out that Lester is a curator for the National Gallery of Art in London. Thanks to a series of recent floods in London, the famous museum has been entirely evacuated, and the priceless artworks have been relocated to Manod for safekeeping.
Convinced he has a young art lover on his hands, Lester takes Dylan under his wing, showing off the vast collection hidden inside the mountain. In return, Dylan convinces Lester to display the paintings in Manod, one at a time. With the inspiration of these great artworks, the townspeople use their own ingenuity and talents to turn Manod into the thing of Hidden Beauty that Dylan always knew it was. As for Minnie, she's still convinced that the answer to the family's money problems is a great art heist. Will she pull off the crime of the century and ruin everything the town has achieved?
Just as in his Carnegie Medal-winning debut novel, MILLIONS, Frank Cottrell Boyce combines a trademark mix of genuine goodwill and tongue-in-cheek humor to FRAMED, resulting in a story that is playful and serious at the same time. Watching the residents of this (literally) dead-end small town respond to the transformative power of art in their own surprising ways, readers may feel inspired to find --- or create --- beauty in their own communities. An end-of-the-book list of the paintings mentioned in the novel may also lead readers to discover masterpieces, either at the National Gallery or closer to home.
