April 15, 2024
Mary Jane, a side character from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, takes center stage. Celebrated scientist and bestselling adult nonfiction author Jahren has chosen as the subject of her fiction debut the girl Huck Finn describes as "just full of sand...beauty--and goodness too." Fourteen-year-old Mary Jane is content to live with her mother and grandfather on the Minnesota frontier, shifting from a remote fur-trading outpost in winter to the comforts of Fort Snelling in summer. But when her aunt begs for help, Mary Jane's mother sends her south via a Mississippi River steamboat, first to Fort Edwards, 400 miles away, and then, in the company of her orphaned cousins, Susan and Joanna, to their new guardian in Greenville, Mississippi. Like her eventual friend Huck Finn, Mary Jane finds adventure, true friendship, and scoundrels on the river. The peripatetic nature of her journey allows for cameo appearances by a wide variety of other characters. White Christian Mary Jane has sympathetic encounters with an Ojibwe family, persecuted members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a Jewish peddler, among many others. She meets Sugar and Candy, an enslaved mother and daughter, and her attempts to help them carefully call out white saviorism. Jahren has done a heroic amount of research but most of all has told a cracking good story. This book soars: Huck Finn has met his match in a wildly appealing, smart, and courageous girl. (map, family tree, author's note, suggested reading) (Historical fiction. 12-16)
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Starred review from May 15, 2024
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* In protagonist Mary Jane, the author has borrowed a minor character from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, many of the characters in this near-epic adventure come from Twain's classic, while others are borrowed from real life. Jahren has done a remarkable job of marrying fact and fiction to create a wonderfully memorable novel that begins in 1846 in the Minnesota Territory, where 14-year-old Mary Jane must travel 400 miles south by boat to help her aunt who, she discovers, is in extremis. Her husband has survived a terrible accident, but just barely; he can no longer talk or stand or work. Mary Jane helps the family as she can, but her aunt falls ill with--presumably--typhoid fever and dies, the same evening Mary Jane's uncle dies of a stroke. In tragedy's wake, Mary Jane's two cousins, Joanna and Susan--along with Mary Jane--are forced to move to Mississippi to live with their uncle Peter Wilks, who at first seems to be a harmless eccentric but quickly is revealed to be a monster. How will the girls escape him? There is more, much more, and all of it pitch-perfect. Beautifully written and rich in fully realized, memorable characters and incident, the book is a treasure. Its surprising but satisfying ending gives Huckleberry Finn a run for its money.
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Starred review from June 1, 2024
Gr 7 Up-In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain gives a scant 30-or-so pages to Mary Jane, "the red-headed one." Twain's readers are left with the confidence that Mary Jane has stolen Huck's heart, but no backstory to explain how or why this should be so. In this companion piece to Twain's classic, Jahren delivers Mary Jane's story in vivid, heart-pounding, nail-biting, soul-stirring detail. It is 1846, and the trading posts and military outposts of northern Minnesota are the only world that 14-year-old Mary Jane Guild has ever known. Her world changes suddenly when a letter from Aunt Evelyn prompts her mother and Morfar (Swedish for grandfather) to send her on a mission of mercy. Mary Jane travels the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Illinois and on to Mississippi and back again. Along the way, she makes friends and foes, learns what it does and does not mean to believe in God and be given to good works, finds the value of the truth, the utility of a good lie, and discovers who she is and where she most belongs. Jahren's first foray into historical fiction is as meticulously researched as her nonfiction narratives without ever seeming tedious or pedantic. VERDICT This imaginative retelling of the story of Huck's red-headed sweetheart is a rollicking adventure full of rich characterizations that will be enjoyed by junior high and high school readers regardless of whether they have read the book that inspired it.-Kelly Kingrey-Edwards
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