A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

4.5 Great read, highly recommended! It’s well-written with plenty of humor, mystery, and unforgettable characters.

I loved this story of 3 strong southern women told in alternating voices: Ginny, nicknamed “Big”, is the matriarch although she’s only 45. Liza, Big’s 30 year old daughter is recovering from a devastating stroke, and Mosey is Liza’s 15 year old daughter. Big is convinced that God sends a trial of epic proportions every 15 years and right on schedule a tiny grave containing a baby’s remains is uncovered while putting in a backyard pool for Liza's therapy. As the mystery unfolds, more mysteries and secrets are revealed.

I loved these characters. Ginny is a strong, fierce “steel magnolia”. Mosey was show more delightful, as was her quirky, nerdy best friend, Roger and her new friend Patti, from an even worse part of the wrong side of the tracks. Liza holds the key to the mystery but her story is told in the third person since she was unable to communicate due to the stroke. I cheered her steps toward recovery and was frustrated that she wasn't receiving the proper therapy.

The story pulled me in and had me guessing the mystery (I was wrong) and rooting for these 3 women. show less

Every 15 years bad things happen to the Slocumb women. It started when Ginny got pregnant at 15, and continued when her daughter Liza also become a mom at 15 and ran away from home. Now that Liza's daughter Mosely is 15, things are already falling apart. Liza has suffered a stroke that has left her unable to speak. Ginny watches Mosely like a hawk, watching for signs that she is about to go wild. But when Ginny hires someone to cut down the willow tree in the back yard of their small Mississippi home, secrets are revealed and the trouble gets even bigger, threatening everything the Slocumb women think and know about their bond.

Some authors are good storytellers, and others are good writers. It is rare to find an author like Joshilyn show more Jackson who can fill both roles. Jackson has always been a lyrical writer who creates memorably flawed but strong and sympathetic female characters. This time she adds a mystery that kept me frantically turning the pages to get to the final devastating revelation. The result is her best book yet, and one that in a perfect world would garner her recognition and accolades from the literary establishment. It's sad and funny, gritty but also optimistic. Although there is a bit of a romance for one character, it's definitely all about the women and the families we make by blood and by love. show less

In A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson three generations of Slocumb women are struggling to get by in their small Mississippi town while facing incredible odds set against them. Ginny, who is called Big by her daughter and granddaughter knows that every fifteen years something bad happens to Slocumb women and they are on the cusp of that bad year. When Big was 15, she had her fierce daughter, Liza. History repeated itself when Liza had her daughter at 15. Now Mosey is fifteen. Mosey has faced a life time of being warned about and away from this curse, but the curse may be taking other directions for this generation. Liza has had a stroke and then a small grave is unearth in the backyard. Can Big hold her family together while show more trying to find an explanation? And will Mosey discover the answers she seeks?

The chapters in Joshilyn Jackson's A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty alternate between the three Slocumb women. Each woman has a distinct voice in her chapter and there is strong character development for each woman individually. What they are thinking can be very different from what they are sharing with each other, especially since Liza is essentially nonverbal, but each of them is facing the threat to their family and the questions the mystery brings head-on, in their own way.

Why, oh why, did I wait so long to read A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty? This is an outstanding novel by a most accomplished writer. I've enjoyed every book Jackson has written and this incredible novel is no exception. The multilayered plot is complex and I appreciate how additional information was slowly discovered. And I completely understood Big hiding her suspicions from Mosely while Mosely is doing the same. I was absolutely spellbound and immersed in this novel. You couldn't have torn me away from reading it. And when I finished reading, I knew that I had just read something splendid, flawless, and sublime... and perfect. When I was done there was not one thing I would have wanted differently. Bravo, Joshilyn Jackson!

Jackson has a new novel being released this November, Someone Else's Love Story, and I am going to just preorder it now and schedule time to read it right away.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the very best show less

UPDATE from a re-read of the audiobook with a 5 ⭐️ review:
I just finished an all-day, marathon listening session of A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. I don't often re-read books, but I'm so glad I did with this one. I still loved and obsessed over Joshilyn Jackson's writing style and her ability to capture Southern women to a T! I still thought the characters were very well written. The storyline once again grabbed my attention right away and the ending was as it should have been. I could easily read another book that picks up where this one left off.

From first read of the physical book with a 4.5 ⭐️ review:
I simply adore Jackson's writing! I get it. I relate. The characters are always interesting and well-defined. I find myself show more hearing the voices I create for them in my head as I read their lines.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty was funny and touching. It captured just how precious and powerful the grandmother/mother/daughter bond can be! Big, the grand matriarch, loved and protected her own. Liza, the less-than-stellar mom, loved her baby girl in her own special way. Mosey, the big mystery in the book, was the typical teenager while still being loving and respectful. I loved them all!!! show less

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty is about three remarkable women: Big (Ginny Slocumb, age 45), her daughter Liza (“Little”), age 30, and Liza’s daughter Mosey (age 15), and each voice alternates in different chapters. They live in Immita, Mississippi in a small house with a big yard, where Big wants to put in a swimming pool. Liza had a stroke several months earlier, and hydrotherapy would be good for her. But in the process of getting the yard dug up, the past also gets dug up, and secrets sprout like weeds from the newly upturned soil.

Discussion: Joshilyn Jackson’s main female characters are delightful, full of spit and vinegar and impassioned love and loyalty. They are women you absolutely wish you knew; women you admire who fight show more for what they believe in and for whom they love. This alone makes Jackson’s books worth reading, but there is always more. She adds tension and humor, and in this book, she adds mystery. She kept me guessing the whole way.

Using three generations like she does in this book, she provides an extra kick by writing about the concerns of females at three different pivotal times in their lives. I absolutely loved the great job she did with Mosey, the teenager, and how expertly she could switch to the voice of a woman on the verge of menopause. Each one of the women has a voice that sounds so authentic, and so different from one another in some ways, but what binds them all is love. As Liza observes, Big and Mosey are "soaked" in love: "They have so much it spills out and makes more." Liza doesn't think she is like them, but fierce love drives her as well. And these women are so brave - all three of them! You could wish for worse things in life than to know and be loved by women like these.

Evaluation: Joshilyn Jackson gets better with each book she writes. I understand she does a great job on reading this too, in the audio version. Highly recommended! show less

Audiobook performed by the author.
4.5****

Excerpt from the book jacket: When a long-hidden grave is unearthed in the backyard, headstrong young Mosey Slocumb is determined to investigate. What she learns could cost her family everything… Every fifteen years, trouble comes after the three Slocumb women: a child on the cusp of womanhood searching for her true family; a woman whose fight to protect her daughter will toss her headlong into a second chance at first love; and a lost soul rediscovering her voice.

My reaction:
Wow. I was mesmerized from beginning to end. Jackson writes the kind of Southern fiction I absolutely love – full of bigger-than-life characters facing “un-possible” plot twists, and sprinkled with colorful dialogue show more and idioms. She also writes strong female characters and all three Slocumb women show strength, albeit in different ways. Big, as matriarch, has the advantage of maturity and experience; she fights hard to maintain a stable family environment for her daughter and granddaughter. Liza shows the kind of strength and determination required to survive and recover from a debilitating stroke. Mosey has the strength of character that comes from knowing that she is loved and treasured. All three make their share of mistakes, but all face their future with a determination to succeed and the knowledge that they will always have each other to count on.

The chapters move back and forth between these three women and their various points of view. In this way the reader is privy to more information than any one of the women has, but that doesn’t mean I knew the solution to the mystery much sooner than the characters did. The only reason I don’t give the book five stars is that I was disappointed in how Liza and Big behaved around certain men. Liza, in particular, didn’t seem to have learned much from having had a child at age 15, except perhaps refining her ploys for not getting caught. But this was really a small part of the book.

Jackson read the audio version of the book herself. She is a talented voice-over artist and was easily able to give each woman enough individuality that I had no trouble telling them apart. She has good pacing and a style of reading that is just perfect for her novels. show less

I haven’t actually read a Joshilyn Jackson novel since her first, gods in Alabama (pre-blog), but I have a couple of them hanging around in TBR Purgatory. However, I recently decided to skip over them in favor of reading her latest, A Grown-up Kind of Pretty, in audiobook, as narrated by Jackson herself.

Jackson is a perfect reader for her own work. Her fiction's Southern voice is unmistakable, and her southern-accented speaking voice reinforces that. She tells the Slocumb women's story in three voices--first-person narration alternating between grandmother Ginny and teenage Mosey, with occasional flashback chapters from daughter Liza's distanced, brain-damaged perspective--and succeeds in giving each a distinctive sound, defining them show more perhaps more effectively than the writing alone might.

I thought the character I'd relate to most in this novel would be Ginny--we're in the same age range and both entered motherhood when we were a bit too young for it, although Ginny's story of early parenthood is a lot more reminiscent of Lorelai Gilmore's--but frankly, there were times she irritated me. I really enoyed her granddaughter Mosey, though, a convincing and endearing teenager. But all that said, the plot of A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty hooked me more than the characters. Long-buried secrets seem to be a staple in Jackson's fiction, and she's come up with some good ones here, with twists that I wasn't able to anticipate. While I felt that the story eventually took a few turns into cliché-Southern-melodrama territory, for the most part I enjoyed the ride--which seems an appropriate thing to say about a book I "read" on my daily commute. show less