She feels she can breathe more easily, and welcomes the overt affection that the Cones shower her with. Mary Jane falls in love with the family and life at their home. She brings a certain amount of order into Izzy’s life, and the Cone household as a whole - while still retaining the warm and casual family atmosphere. Izzy is a whirlwind of youthful innocence and exuberance, and Mary Jane quickly becomes attached to her.

What she finds in the Cone household is a completely different way of life: the Cones are a more progressive, rather more chaotic, and far less uptight family. In summer 1975, Mary Jane is hired by the Cone family to nanny for their daughter, Izzy. They think Gerald Ford is a great president. Their lives are ordered, “proper”, predictable, and rather bland. Mary Jane Dillard is the only child of two very straight-laced parents. Mary Jane is a warm-hearted, well-written story of Mary Jane’s coming-of-age in 1970s Baltimore, during a momentous summer. After finishing it, I think it’s a pretty apt comparison, but this novel stands very much on its own, too. This novel is pitched as “ Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones and the Six” - one of my favourite movies, and one of my favourite recent novels. 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. 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). A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in. 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.

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. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. 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 Showtunes of the Month record club. A young woman finds herself during a momentous summer

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau