ADVENTURES OF MARY JANE

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.