Adventures of Mary Jane
This sparkling new novel is based, like several other recent successes, on a character swiped from a classic. Hope Jahren has chosen as protagonist red-headed, feisty, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane Guild, a minor figure in Huckleberry Finn. According to Huck, she’s “most awful beautiful” and “has more sand in her than any other girl I ever see … just full of sand.” (“Sand” approximates “guts” in modern slang.) High praise indeed, and from Mark Twain’s brief sketch, Jahren creates a rounded character whose adventures, told in a sassy, memorable voice, carry her from one end of the Mississippi River to the other.
Set in 1846, Jahren’s picaresque novel stars a lovable and resourceful adolescent, just like Huckleberry Finn. Also, like Huck, Mary Jane meets a string of wonderful characters along the way, including the warm-hearted Mrs. Captain, the orphan Rooster, the angelic Raccoon Man, and the appalling enslaver Peter Wilks (borrowed from Twain).
Like Huckleberry Finn, Mary Jane gets just a bit slow towards the end. The elderly Twain himself has a cameo in the tale—one of several anachronisms that don’t particularly matter in a work of Dickensian magical realism. (For example, Mary Jane’s favorite books are Dickens’s A Child’s History of England [1852] and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1854].)
The quirky book design features short sub-chapters that whisk the action along, and a useful map and family tree, as well as occasional letters set in handwriting, and passages in Norwegian, French, and dialect.
Jahren is the author of the much-praised memoir Lab Girl, and this is her first work of fiction, ostensibly for young adults. But all readers will be dying to know what happens after Huck and Mary Jane light out for the territory—together!
