Baths! Bedtime stories! She organizes the house and cooks dinner, charming her hard-rocking housemates Jimmy and Sheba - and the reader too. She introduces structure and stability to her young charge. While the summer changes her, Mary Jane changes the people she encounters as well. She is a responsible girl who is “still happy helping my mother with the chores in the house,” singing show tunes and “making a simple dessert featured in Good Housekeeping.” This churchgoing teenager is innocent, but her innocence is powerful. Unlike many young narrators, Mary Jane is neither angry nor rebellious nor twisted. It’s a schematic setup - strait-laced suburbanites versus groovy artists - but this book works because it’s got a great protagonist. When a rock star and his singer-actress wife come to stay for intensive addiction therapy, Mary Jane learns some new words and concepts. Cone, is a psychiatrist and a Jew - “another breed of human,” as Mary Jane’s father explains. Cone, doesn’t wear a bra, and her father, Dr. Before dinner, her father says grace, giving thanks for “his wonderful wife and obedient child.” But the 14-year-old takes a summer job as a nanny for a different sort of family in Jessica Anya Blau’s delightful novel. It’s 1975, and Mary Jane Dillard is growing up in a perfectly neat house in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood with a picture of President Ford hanging on the wall.
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