Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

 genre: historical fiction

When Mary Jane decides to spend the summer of 1975 babysitting the five year old Izzy Cone, she has no idea how this one choice will create the kind of summer that can change you life.  The daughter of a psychologist, Izzy's home becomes the refuge for famous musician and his tv star wife as he detoxes from drugs.  Mary Jane's parents don't know that, though, they cannot or Mary Jane would never be allowed to babysit Izzy.  The sort of organized domesticity that  Mary Jane brings to the chaotic Cone household will only be outshone by the radical acceptance, untamed love and messy adult problems that fourteen year old Mary Jane sees, at first from the sidelines, and then from the sticky middle.  

There was so much in this book that caught my attention and kept it.  I felt transported to Baltimore in the mid 70s, I even found myself on googlemaps searching out places that still exists, just twenty minutes from where I currently live. The country clubs and private schools, the racial divides and bigotry both whispered and overt.  Especially, though, Mary Jane.  Oh. my heart just understood her fourteen year old heart in all its completely, all of it's sloshy middle between adulthood and childhood.  Her devotion to Izzy, her desire to instill the kind of order her mother has taught her is the ONLY way, her need to feel SEEN, her own budding sexuality that's so consuming and confusing.  All of it - it's a realistic and poignant coming of age.  I think what also captured me was Mary Jane's love of music and singing  - a love that catapulted the movie star and her singer husband into the realm of hero-worship.  I looked up so many songs while reading!  

Most of all, though, this is a book about Mary Jane's eyes and mind being opened up to a new way of living.  A new way of parents interacting with their children.  New ways of keeping house, of teaching, expressing emotion, of experiencing the world - to have her own conservative worldview be suddenly cracked open by literal sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll was such an intriguing premise. We see these adult problems through the eyes of a naive teen who is also trying to protect and teach an even younger child, I like stories told from this perspective.  I appreciated that this isn't a book about Mary Jane finding her own first romantic experiences - it was so much more about her even beginning to realize that she is a person who feels her own kind of feelings about things.  

It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea (this is an adult book with adult themes, language and scenes) but I found that I didn't want to put it down.