Mary Jane

this was an utterly charming coming of age story that i couldn't put down. seeing the naive, conservative mary jane being exposed to the loose, liberal cone family and realize that other value systems and ways of life are ok felt so true and was so fun to watch. (it reminded me a bit of my meeting people in college who drank and smoked and skipped classes, but were still good people, unlike what i'd assumed of rule breakers. mary jane learned this before i did.) i loved being inside her head as she navigated this new world and as she both learned and misunderstood so much. blau so perfectly captured this age where she both was a little adult and knew so much but was also still a child and had so much to learn.

mary jane and izzy were show more especially enjoyable to be around. i feel like, in many ways, mary jane at 14 is a better mother to izzy than i am to my son, and i can learn a lot from both of their attitudes and how everything they do is so full of love. sheba was great, too, but i couldn't get enough of izzy.

i really, really enjoyed everything about this. (the audio reader was great, too. so good that as much as i liked this, i'm not sure i would have liked it quite as much if i hadn't listened to it.) even the ending, which may be a bit unrealistic - would mary jane's mother really have relaxed that much? really changed that much in such a short period of time? maybe. maybe not. but i appreciate the sentiment. show less

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***

I couldn’t find the magic in this story about an adolescent who one summer works a babysitting gig for a free-spirited family. The protagonist and narrator is Mary Jane Dillard, a naïve but mature and capable fourteen-year-old, and the child of two bland parents who live their lives in traditional gender roles. The Dillards have all the trappings of a rich, white family: They belong to a country club, live in an elegant house in a posh neighborhood, and send their daughter to a pricy private school. Their concerns never extend beyond the comfortingly banal: cooking, gardening, church-going. Mary Jane’s parents are offensive to her because her life with them is boring and rigid. The stage is set for her to put show more the Cones, a family totally unlike her own, on a pedestal.

This book isn’t especially original; it’s just another tale about someone who discovers the joys to be found in embracing a carefree approach to life—or rather, it’s supposed to be. The story has a huge problem here, and it’s at the core of that premise: Mary Jane discovers this joy via a really dysfunctional family.

For most of the story I felt little pings of surprise but no strong feelings. By the end I was deeply annoyed, even angry. The Cones, the family Jessica Anya Blau wants her readers to view as the ideal, are laissez-faire to a fault. They neglect their five-year-old’s physical needs; leave their fridge packed with mostly spoiled food; house Jimmy and Sheba, ditzy celebrities who live with the Cones while Jimmy works to get sober; and smoke pot (with the drug addict who’s trying to get sober) in front of their kid. They not only have no qualms about having a fourteen-year-old grocery shop daily, cook all three meals daily, clean up their messes, and entirely care for their child for long hours each day, but they delight in it. And Blau expected her reader to delight in it too because she confused the Cone parents’ irresponsibility and chaos with a refreshing brand of rebellion. She assumed that as long as she depicted them as kind overall, as long as they kissed and encouraged their five-year-old, they couldn’t be described as neglectful. She thought that it’s supposed to be part of some flaky charm that these parents hired not a teen babysitter but a replacement parent and maid.

Mary Jane is about the titular Mary Jane, but it’s also a tale of two families: the Dillards and Cones. However, the bulk of the story is centered on the mess that is the Cone family, with the Dillards an afterthought, as if Blau found them too boring to even think about. Unfortunately for the story, without any vivid sense of the Dillard parents, it’s hard to understand, much less appreciate, why Mary Jane finds the Cones appealing. But ultimately, for these families to be contrasted in any meaningful way, they’d have to be nuanced, and all the characters, even narrator Mary Jane, are flat as boards.

Toward the end, when the Dillard parents finally get more page time, they prove to be not that terrible. Blau’s view of family is black-and-white: a straitlaced family is automatically all bad, and a devil-may-care family is automatically all good. The Dillard parents aren’t perfect—without question, their elitist, prejudiced, and sexist views are abhorrent—but they behave as parents to their daughter and run a properly functioning household. They simply aren’t oppressive enough for it to make sense that a daughter they’ve taken good care of for fourteen years would turn against them so passionately.

It’s in these later pages that my annoyance turned to anger. I thought the story was going to redeem itself when Mary Jane’s mom explains to her daughter that it’s inappropriate for Mary Jane, a child, to be taking care of the Cone family. I thought that here the story would have a much-needed moment of sense and emotional clarity as Mary Jane would come to understand that conflicting feelings can coexist. I thought that, with her mother’s help, Mary Jane would acknowledge that although she finds joy in the Cone household, she also can recognize and condemn this family’s dysfunction. Instead Blau presented Mary Jane’s mom’s belief as a shortcoming, an uptight view stemming from her traditionalism and unfamiliarity with the Cones.

The only thing Mary Jane has going for it is Mary Jane herself. She’s a likable narrator who tells the story in an easygoing, conversational voice that kept my attention to the end. For this reason, as a reading experience, Mary Jane is good—Blau’s personable writing style is exactly the kind I gravitate toward—but as a story experience, it’s exasperating. The bones of a stand-out story are here but only the bones. Mary Jane is both too undeveloped and too problematic to be called complete, and it’s way too annoying to be the joyful story Blau was intending.

NOTE: I received this as an Advance Reader Copy from Goodreads in March 2021. show less

The story of a teenaged girl in the seventies whose home-life is buttoned-up and whose mother seems interested only in doing all her house-wifery exactly right. When Mary Jane gets a job babysitting for new neighbors for the summer, she gets introduced to a whole different way of living that includes rock and roll, lazy housekeeping, communication--and celebrity and addiction. I loved this easy but substantive read. I thought Blau captured beautifully the appeal and the danger of the world Mary Jane was being introduced to. Mary Jane's mother hasn't got it all wrong, and the neighbors haven't got it all right, and that dichotomy is never lost even as the reader (probably) finds the neighbors' lifestyle much more fun and, in some ways, show more more healthy. Recommended. show less

Mary Jane is a delightful coming-of-age story about a fourteen-year-old girl from a rigid and sheltered home who enters a completely different world when she gets a summer job as a nanny for a neighboring couple, the Cones, who are as lax as her parents are uptight. Worse, Dr. Cone is actually a psychiatrist, and to make it even worse, a famous rock star and his famous actress wife are staying there while he gets treatment for his heroin addiction.

Mary Jane is obviously entranced by this family and their famous guests and loves her charge, the precocious and adorable Izzy. Her experience challenges her in many ways since the Cones are the opposite of her own family. Mrs. Cone does not cook while Mary Jane is an excellent cook thanks to show more helping her mother cook. The house is as messy as her own house is neat. While ostensibly a nanny, Mary Jane because the chief cook and bottle washer, getting Izzy to help her as she helped her mother. She even lies to her mother so she can cook the evening meal for the Cones.

The more she learns about the Cones, the more she reconsiders her own family. Yes, they have order, cleanliness, and daily meals planned out in advance, but the Cones have none of that and seem happier in their disorder than her family is with all its structure. However, as the summer progresses, the secrets she is keeping start to fall apart.

I liked Mary Jane a lot, though I believe it may be a polarizing book. The author, Jessica Anya Blau, clearly prefers the loving, but dysfunctional Cone family to Mary Jane’s well-ordered, but emotionally distant family. A fourteen-year-old girl bringing order to chaos does not speak well of the adults, but readers cannot help but admire Dr. Cone and love the rest of the Cone household.

Meanwhile, Mary Jane learns some ugly truths about her own family when she realizes they are racist. She thinks, “”We’d learned about the Holocaust in school. Just like we learned about the civil rights movement. What we’d never learned was that sometimes the people who kept those ideas alive were the people you lived with.” I thought this was a profound recognition of how these noxious beliefs continue. I also thought they seemed searingly relevant to today when so many of us are seeing our own family and friends perpetuate racist ideas while blithely assuming they haven’t a racist bone in their bodies.

I loved the book. I devoured it. I am sure many will object to a fourteen-year-old being exposed to adult problems, drugs, nudity, and sexuality. I think, though, that the Cone household was loving and I can’t think of a better example of loving-kindness than Dr. Cone responding to Mary Jane’s confession that she is a sex addict. I just loved this book.

Mary Jane will be published on May 11th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

Mary Jane at Custom House Books | Harper Collins
Jessica Anya Blau author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/07/9780063052291/ show less

Talk about expanding a world view. It is 1975, Mary Jane Dillard is 14 and her suburban Baltimore life is very sheltered, proscribed and narrow - though she would never define it that way. Her mother is the consummate house wife with a strict cleaning schedule, a weekly meal plan, and gardening, teaching Sunday school, and tea at the country club for fun. She carefully instructs Mary Jane in all these pursuits. Her father is a lawyer and leads the family in grace each night (where he thanks God for an obedient daughter, a wonderful wife and asks God to bless President Ford) and that’s about the extent of his contribution to the household. Mary Jane herself likes to sing show tunes, read and listen to records with her only friends - show more twin sisters who are away at camp for the summer. So when the opportunity to be a summer nanny for a doctor’s daughter, it seems like a godsend. What it is is a life-altering experience. The Cone household is utter chaos. Izzy is adorable, but totally uncontrolled. Mrs Cone doesn’t cook or clean and the house is always in disorder, but she is kind and intelligent -and bra-less. Dr Cone is a psychiatrist with shaggy sideburns and leisure suits. It’s a shocks to Mary Jane’s system, but she loves it. But the crux of her job becomes clear when the Cones sweat her to secrecy over their summer guests: Jimmy, a famous musician and his wife Sheba, a TV variety show star. Dr Cone will be exclusively treating Jimmy for his addictions and trying to keep the couple hidden in the sleepy suburb. Initially, Mary Jane is starstruck, but that is overshadowed by shock of a completely different lifestyle: lots of shouting, F bombs in ordinary conversation, frank talk about sex, various states of undress, PDA, and marijuana use. It is a comic, really - thankfully no creepy vibes. And Mary Jane becomes the adult, caring for Izzy, cleaning, cooking nightly meals that mirror her mother’s. And they all love her for it. She gains confidence, is appreciated, sings with the stars who compliment her talent, and is adored by Izzy. She even goes on a week beach trip with them and they begin to call her family. She eats it up! But to stay in this world, she has lied to her parents letting them think Mrs Cone is gravely ill and that is why she is so needed. It all has to come to light sometime and when it does the consequences are pretty harsh. I had a little trouble buying the ending but I loved the storytelling and could almost feel the stretching of Mary Jane’s mind and world. Thanks to Custom House (William Morrow) for the ARC. show less

Shy quiet and bookish, Mary Jane Dillard is happy when she gets herself hired to be the summer nanny for five year old Isabel Cone. But she finds herself entering a chaotic household, very different from the conservative, respectable household that she is used to. She and her charge, Izzy hit it off and become close to each other. She tells her mother very little bout the Coins but she is pleased that Mary Jane is working for a doctor. She doesn’t tell her mother that Dr. Cone isn’t a medical doctor but instead is a psychiatrist who has dedicated his summer to helping a rock star get straight. He and his movie star wife move into the Cones incognito. These additional two round out this found family and Mary Jane is having the best show more summer of her life.

This is a tender, funny and engaging coming of age story and I really enjoyed spending time with this fourteen year old girl. The author captures the 1970s effortlessly with references to avocado-colored appliances, macrame, and President Ford. Mary Jane’s eyes are opened to the exploration of class, race, lifestyle and gender stereotypes from the era as she comes to the discovery that her uptight parents don’t know the answer to everything.

[Mary Jane] is a great story that draw you in as Mary Jane is embraced by these free spirited people and learns about life. Mary Jane is a likeable narrator and someone that is easy to have sympathy for. I was sorry to see the story end. show less

In Baltimore in 1975, fourteen year old Mary Jane has been hired to be the Summer nanny to five year old neighbor Izzy Cone. Mary Jane and Izzy come from very different households, with the Cones living in a mess, Mrs Cone not bothering to cook and Izzy's coloring book is of human anatomy. Mary Jane has grown up in a strict religious household where her mother controls her every move, which is why Mary Jane knows she has to lie to her mother in order to keep her job, especially when Dr. Cone moves two famous people into the house to treat the rockstar husband for drug addiction.
A coming of age story that focuses on the permissive and sometimes thoughtless parenting of the 70s. The reader has to wonder why the Cones would put a fourteen show more year old in charge of their daughter, and very quickly, the whole household, as level-headed Mary Jane becomes the housekeeper, cook and sounding board to the four adults in the house. I liked the story more in the beginning when I thought it would focus more on Mary Jane becoming independent of her parents, but it was much more about how the adults in the Cone household were too selfish to protect the children from their disastrous lives. At one point, Mary Jane is forced to take part in a group therapy session about infidelity. I also started focusing on how often these adults were touching her, kissing her forehead, asking about her feelings. Not a winner for me, but I didn't hate it. show less