Jahren, Hope. Adventures of Mary Jane. Delacorte, 2024. 978-0-593-48411-1. 441 p. $19.99. Grades 7-9.

Perhaps not as epic as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Mary Jane models its characterization, sense of adventure, introspection, and wise commentary on the famous tale by Mark Twain. Fourteen-year-old Mary Jane Guild, child of Norwegian immigrants on her mother’s side, is accustomed to icy winters and hard work on Lake Winnipeg and milder springs and summers, some formal schooling, and more hard work down the Mississippi at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where her Morfar (grandfather) clerks at the trading station and her mother nurses at the hospital. Mary Jane shares quick mathematical skills with her beloved Morfar, but maintains a distant relationship with her no-nonsense, disciplined Ma. When Ma receives her annual letter from her only younger sister, Evelyn, asking for help, Ma packs up Mary Jane with three new dresses, her copy of Dickens, some medicinal essentials, and a jar of her daughter’s favorite sour cherries and sends her off to Fort Edwards, further down the river in Illinois. After an eventful trip by steamboats, where Mary Jane encounters some very good and very bad people, she lands at her relative’s modest home and finds Uncle George Wilks paralyzed and bedridden from a work accident and Aunt Evelyn, a loving and emotionally present person to her husband and two children, fifteen year-old Susan, who is sweet, and fourteen year-old Joanna, who is smart. More mature and skilled than her cousins, Mary Jane digs in helping with the chores and getting the penniless family back on track. In return, she learns a lot about devotion to another person and a loving family. She meets a Mormon family, the Schmidts, who have befriended the Wilks and shared food with them, though they are gentiles, and makes fast friends with the thoughtful and practical daughter, Margaret. After only five or six months at the Wilks, Evelyn and George succumb to fever and stroke, respectively, despite Mary Jane’s valiant efforts to keep them alive. Since it is the 1800’s, the girls cannot return to the maternal side of the family, but must travel to Greenville, Mississippi, to live with their Uncle Peter Wilks, a wealthy tannery owner. So as not to be separated, Mary Jane claims to be their nineteen-year old sister. On their trip to Greenville with her cousins, Mary Jane is reunited with Mrs. Captain, a woman steamboat pilot, who boosts Mary Jane’s confidence and whose philosophy is it is better to be kind than mean. Turns out, Uncle Peter is lascivious, crude, and demanding. He keeps two enslaved people, a mother and daughter, Sugar and Candy, and has sold the rest of his “property” for $6,000 in gold. Immediately, Mary Jane sets out a way to save up enough money for passage so they can escape. Unfortunately, the three girls fall into an insouciant lifestyle in their comfortable new accommodations.  Most regrettably, in order to dissuade the uncle from thinking they were plotting anything, Mary Jane takes on the role of mistress of the house, bossing around Sugar, and giving the woman mixed signals about her true abolitionist beliefs. The girls’ escape seems imminent when Mary Jane catches the uncle in a lewd position with the unwilling Susan. Once again, Mary Jane must rise to the challenge and protect her family.  A reply to the  message she sends to her mother for help through the newly minted telegram plops the problem back in Mary Jane’s lap. At a crossroads, Mary Jane discovers Uncle Peter racked with fever and nurses him in return for his promise to pay her. When he dies, two fraudulent “uncles” arrive to claim the inheritance accompanied by a young, “blue eyes, pony tailed” boy named Joe. Mary Jane and her cousins know the pair are not their uncles, but decide to act dumb and work the situation to their own advantage. The ensuing wake, funeral, and reading of the will is an uproarious town event, made even more bizarre when the real uncles arrive from England. The would-be robbers run off, including Joe, and the good and kind uncles offer their nieces a home in Sheffield, England. All the girls reject the idea of returning to Morfar and Ma/Aunt Ida, but Mary Jane is torn: to leave her family or follow her heart. Author Hope Jahren has crafted this yarn with actual places and people interspersed from that time period and place. The end of Huckleberry Finn introduces the reader to Mary Jane and her cousins and the episode involving Peter Wilks’s funeral and robbery. Like Huck Finn, too, Jahren has infused both her narrator and other characters with the see-saw of morality, the brutality of enslaving people, and the choice to be kind and good or not. Her Mary Jane is a girl with flaws and naivete who draws on her inner strength, not because she wants to, but because life forces her to do so. It is a hopeful life lesson for all of us.

THOUGHTS: I felt three ways reading this book: the first part, I was captivated by this involved, multi-character story reminiscent of  Charles Dickens or Mark Twain novels, appropriate for middle school; mid-book, I changed perspective because of a scene indicating that the cousins’ uncle is masturbating while molesting one of the cousins and I realized the cousins are pretty flat characters, though they are like appendages to Mary Jane as they share the same escapades. I also started to wonder about Jahren’s use of dialect (I did not get Uncle Peter Wilks’s Yorkshire accent (is he laughing?) and Father Schmidt I assume originally came from Maine, but would a fifth or sixth grader know that?; the last part gives the strongest nod to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, the imagery, language, and the ingenuity of the plot sustained me and made me long for time to read its pages. What it says about growing up, about an organized religion versus one’s beliefs, about goodness and badness co-existing in the world, about death and grief, about the strength in being a woman echo a lot of Twain’s message that I think is worth holding on to. Jahren’s creation of Mary Jane, with her impressions and development from a segment in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn makes this book something really special.

Historical Fiction