Mary Jane

Mary Jane is a slowly paced story about a teen girl who has lived a sheltered life under the close watch and expectations of her prejudiced and uptight parents. Mary Jane takes a job as a summer nanny to a five-year-old girl and is pulled into this unconventional family and feels a connection to them that she has missed with her own parents. It has been touted as a good pick for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six but besides the similar era, these two books are nothing alike.

Mary Jane is a main character readers will easily get behind and her relationship with five-year-old Izzy was the sweetest part of the book. But the story itself teetered between being dull, exasperating, and uncomfortable as Mary Jane witnesses a different way of life with the free-spirited, yet highly dysfunctional Cone family and their house guests. Their lifestyle (complete with lots of love but also drugs, booze, and icky naked dudes) shows Mary Jane a different kind of family. But the positive aspects of the Cones didn't make up for the toxic environment, which was rife with neglect, dysfunction, and truly uncomfortable situations.

Too much time is spent on monotonous day-to-day events like food shopping, cleaning a fridge and sing-alongs. There's no tension, a mainly unlikable cast and I never felt swept away to the 70's or captivated by the plot. Except for the lovely bond between Mary Jane and wee Izzy, this was a struggle for me to get through and I just don't understand its hype.

My Rating: 2.5 stars

Author: Jessica Anya Blau

Genre: Historical Fiction (US - 1950's)

Type and Source: Hardcover from public library

Publisher: Custom House

First Published: May 11, 2021

Opening Lines: Mrs. Cone showed me around the house. I wanted 

to stop at every turn and examine the things that were stacked 

and heaped in places they didn't belong: books teetering 

on a burner on the stove, a coffee cup on a shoebox in the 

entrance hall, a copper Buddha on the radiator a pink 

blow-up pool raft in the center of the living room.

Book Description from GoodReads: "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 strait-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 Show Tunes 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.