Mary Jane
Mary Jane - Jessica Anya Blau
my review : ✮✮✮✮
What a fun fun fun ride.
I think everyone will like this book. Don’t be turned off by the fact that the narrator is a 14 year old girl, this a mature, funny, cheeky, adorable story. You may be a bit disturbed by what this 14 year old is privy to, but in my mind 14 was 18 in the 70s. I recommended this to my 19 year old sister and my (age omitted) mother. This is kind of the equivalent of the song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac- an all ages hit. Except, there is a ton of mature content so no one under 18 should read it. LOL.
Our story is set in Baltimore in the 1970s and follows strait laced & sweet Mary Jane who sings in the church choir and is best friends with her mom. When she gets a job babysitting for a ‘respectable’ doctor and his wife, she is shocked to enter the home and see the life they live is nowhere near as prim and proper as she’s used to. Even more disturbing to Mary Jane, this doctor is a psychiatrist (god forbid!) who has cleared his schedule this summer to treat a VERY famous rockstar. So, a week into Mary Jane’s job the rock star and his movie star wife move in and Mary Jane’s life is turned upside down……
I had fun reading this book, and I floated around humming for the rest of the night after finishing it.
I would pair this book with a glass of Sancerre. Let’s pretend it’s the 70s and a very cool rockstar is living with us. Oh! And let’s sing more. Even if you sound like a cow (ME!). 🎶
Our protagonist would be 66 today- my favorite thing to do after finishing this book was thinking about what she would be doing now….
you’ll love this book if you love:
Any Taylor Jenkins Reid
Time-traveling back to the ’70s
my favorite quote:
“In the Cone family, there was no such thing as containment. Feelings were splattered around the household with the intensity of a spraying fire house. I was terrified of what I might witness or hear tonight. But along with that terror, my fondness for the Cones only grew. To feel something was to feel alive. And to feel alive was starting to feel like love.”
