Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

 

Stephany recommended Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau and I can see why she did.  In 1970s Baltimore, a young teen takes a babysitting job with the Cones. Dr. Cone, his wife, and their daughter Izzy couldn't be a more different family from Mary Jane's conservative one. Soon it turns out that Dr. Cone, a psychiatrist, will be treating a famous rock star for his addiction issues and he and his famous wife will be living with the Cones for the summer. As the summer progresses, Mary Jane learns more and more about herself and as the end of the summer rolls around, the Mary Jane we leave is quite different from the Mary Jane we first met on page one.

I loved this book. I loved how Mary Jane stayed her genuine self throughout all the strange things that were happening in the house around her. I love how she took the lessons from her conservative upbringing that she wanted to take about singing, cooking, and cleaning, and applied those to her second life at the Cones house, but she didn't take the beliefs she disagreed with with her. 

The characters were so well-drawn, from Mary Jane and Izzy to Mary Jane's mom and Beanie Jones. It was like I was there and I could see the vinyl at the record shop and touch the disgusting seventies orange shag carpet and smell the marijuana smoke and hear the neighbors gossiping behind closed doors. I was very impressed with this book. 5/5 stars

Lines of note:

What in the past had seemed normal suddenly felt abnormally hushed, quiet, and contained. It was like we were in a play that went on forever and ever without any dramatic tension. (page 149)

I think everyone has that moment when you spend a lot of time away from the house where you grew up and suddenly everything seems different and strange. Mine was coming back from the first semester of college. 

If you had asked me at the beginning of the summer if I knew my parents well, I would have said yes. But these two people sitting here were utterly foreign to me. In school we'd learned about anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, racism, and the civil rights movement. What we'd never learned was that sometimes ideas of racism and anti-Semitism were sparked to life by the very people you lived with. (page 152)

The first time I heard my father use a racial slur that I knew was a racial slur was eye-opening for me. I knew at that moment that I did not want to be like him. 

Once, on a family trip to San Francisco, we'd visited the Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum at Fisherman's Wharf. When I saw the wax people there, I thought of our Christmas photos. (page 208)

The imagery in this book. Fabulous.