Mary Jane: A Novel

The best book of the summer. InStyleI LOVED this novel....If you have ever sung along to a hit on the radio, in any decade, then you will devour Mary Jane at 45 rpm. Nick HornbyAlmost Famous meets Daisy Jones & The Six in this delightful (New York Times Book Review) novel about a fourteenyearold girls coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straightlaced family and the progressive family she nannies forwho happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.In 1970s Baltimore, fourteenyearold Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her familys subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, shes glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Janes mother says. In a respectable house.The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside its 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 Janes mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important jobhelping 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 frontrow seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle shes always known and the future shes 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 shes going to be.