Review: Mary Jane

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don't know if I have an advantage by never watching "Almost Famous" or reading Daisy Jones and the Six. I went into this book with no preconceived notions.    I was 17 during the summer of 1975, so maybe I can relate to this story more than most readers. 

Was this a coming-of-age novel? Not for Mary Jane. For her, it was more of a story about realizing that there are different worlds out there. And at  14, you have a lot more years left to make up your mind, to "come of age," and that is the age of our protagonist Mary Jane. (clever name, eh? Not. You'll see what I mean if you choose to read this book) It's more a book about the lives of the 'hippies.' And perhaps it is a coming-of-age novel about the adults in Mary Jane's life.

Mary Jane comes from a pretty typical '70s upper-middle-class family. And she decides to be a nanny to a family that is so far left from what she is used to that she doesn't know up from down.  Hippies, as some would label them. The  Cones. A psychiatrist and his wife. They have a 5-year-old daughter Izzy. Mr. Cone is taking a patient (a drug and sex addict) and his wife into his home for the summer.  It seems that the patient and his wife might have been based on the real-life Sonny and Cher.  Interesting right? No, it was not. It was painful, and maybe that is precisely what this author wanted.  To make us as uncomfortable as she possibly could.

 

I can say that there is a new generation that is exactly like the Hippie generation of yore. Is that a good thing?  I don't know, but it seems to happen about every thirty years or so, LOL!

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SYNOPSIS: ""I LOVED this novel....If you have ever sung along to a hit on the radio, in any decade, then you will devour Mary Jane at 45 rpm." —Nick Hornby

Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones and the Six in this funny, wise, and tender novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for—who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.

In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.

The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be."