Back to the Future with Jenna Rose

American adolescence is hard. At times brutal.  Especially for girls. So many lessons need to be learned.  So many Rubicons need crossing.  It’s something most not-yet-women suffer through universally.  Adolescence is at the root of Joni Iraci’s swiftly-moving novel Reinventing Jenna Rose.

Iraci’s novel drew me in and sucked me back to my own youth.

I was 18 when I became a self-sustaining New Yorker.  I suppose I should have been frightened, but I had a grandmother who gave me a place to live, who trusted me to be on my own.  I had all the freedom I could handle to seek myself out.  That was a long time ago, and today, in the world of over-protected teens, it is hard to imagine a 15-year-old whose parents have left her to her own devices.  Which is the case with Jenna Rose, the intrepid heroine of the circuitous story  Iraci weaves.

At open, Jenna Rose’s Dad has disappeared, and Mom, self-consumed and bitter, is AWOL.  Jenna Rose has been ordered to stay where she is, alone in her California house, with all the trappings of wealth but no comfort.  She is the victim of benign neglect, a prisoner of meaningless abundance.  Worst of all, the girl has no idea who she is or what her roots might possibly be. She desperately needs to throw caution to the wind, to take off, to liberate herself and find a life.

Enter a long-lost grandmother in New York City, the ghosted mother of Jenna Rose’s mom.  Jenna Rose decides that the only way to liberate herself, to reconcile the many questions that muddy her past, to forge any kind of a future, she must find the old woman.  Which is how she lands in New York, fabled source of self-identification, in the early days of the 21^st Century.   

The vagaries of adolescence are universally resonant, and Reinventing Jenna Rose reverberates with the elements that make Catcher in the Rye, The Goldfinch, and others timeless.  Jenna Rose faces obstacles no less haunting than Holden Caulfield’s and no less daunting than Theo Decker’s.  Yet her journey is entirely her own, unique picaresque adventure. 

The presence of Jenna Rose’s grandmother and a quirkily empathetic neighbor her own age plus a devoted white German Shepherd bolster Jenna Rose’s quest for Self-Actualization.  With some help from a friendly therapist and reinforcement from her new-found community, she faces and resolves long-buried personal trauma, travels to obscured corners of her own and her family’s pasts, plumbs the depths of her pain, and eventually emerges as a truly three-dimensional woman.

Groping through the multiple shadows cast in Reinventing Jenna Rose, I found myself once again grateful for my grandmother’s indulgences.  Like Jenna Rose’s grandmother, mine never told me what to do or think or feel. She shared wisdom, and I was astute enough to take it.  Most of it. 

The grandmother’s wisdom gives the book another dimension. This is not just another young adult novel. This is a book is that that can be appreciated by people of all ages.  Now that I am older than my grandmother was when I moved to New York, I see myself in the old woman, and I hope that some day my granddaughters will likewise avail themselves of my love and experience.  I want them to appreciate the rich layers of pain, sorrow, joy and peace that make a well-crafted life, a life that might fit into a well-crafted novel like Reinventing Jenna Rose.