And to feel live was starting to feel like love.” “But along with that terror, my fondness for the Cones only grew. Later in the novel, Mary Jane reflects, “In my own house, each day was a perfectly contained lineup of hours where nothing unusual or unsettling was ever said.” By contrast, the Cones are loud, intense, emotional, and Mary Jane always feels a little afraid. Mary Jane will bring order to the household over the course of the summer, but the more relaxed and loving environment of the Cone family will have a profound effect on her as well. Bonnie is not a homemaker, and her shrink husband is a luftmensch, his head in his work, not his home. In contrast to her own orderly home – a place for everything and everything in its place – the Cone household is chaotic, books and clothing piled everywhere, food rotting in the refrigerator.

How did girls know what to whisper about? Why were they all thinking about the same things?” “When I did have to socialize with kids my age,” Mary Jane confides, “I felt like I was from another country. Like Izzy, another only child, Mary Jane has no real friends, feels awkward around girls her age and has absolutely no interest in going to sleepaway camp with her contemporaries. But I liked Izzy better, the way it fizzed on my tongue.”) Mary Jane immediately takes to the child. Riley, had told me her name was Isabelle. (Bumper stickers declaring, IMPEACHMENT: Now More Than Ever are plastered on a door.)

Mary Jane has been hired as the summer nanny of the five-year-old daughter of Richard and Bonnie Cone, a psychiatrist and his wife who likewise live in Roland Park but are the opposite of her parents.

A framed color photograph of Gerald Ford hangs on their dining room wall, visible over her father’s head as he sits at the head of the table reading the newspaper while his wife and daughter serve the meals. Mary Jane is the only child of a conventional Republican father and a humorless, church-going homemaker mother. Narrated in the first person by a 14-year-old girl in 1975, Mary Jane isn’t so much a coming-of-age novel as it is a coming-into-consciousness novel, which may be a quibbling way of saying the same thing since “coming of age” is ultimately all about a character’s self-awareness, but over and over again in this charming, often laugh-out-loud-funny story, the protagonist, Mary Jane Dillard, notices things for the first time, such as her parents’ racism and anti-Semitism, and comes to conclusions about what things are actually valuable and meaningful in a person’s life, as if she is waking up from a long, long sleepwalk.

Mary jane jessica