This is the first book by Gabrielle Zevin that I've read despite her novel The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry being very well received.

Young Jane Young deals with congressional intern Aviva Grossman who makes the mistake of sleeping with her boss - i.e. the very married Congressman. Comparisons can be easily made between Aviva's fictional story and that of Monica Lewinsky. And Zevin clearly showcases the double standard in a case such as Aviva's where her entire life is turned upside down after one youthful indiscretion, making her unhirable to anyone who is able to do a Google search, forcing her to move and change her name to the titular Jane Young, yet the Congressman gets to continue to be in office and his reputation is quickly back on track.

Zevin doesn't just choose to make this Aviva's story, however. We are given perspectives from the women who are all effected in some way by the scandal. Rachel - Aviva's mother, Aviva - aka Jane - herself, Ruby - Aviva's daughter, and Embeth - the wife of the congressman. I really loved the varying degrees in which the scandal effects these women at different times in their lives and how they each choose to deal with it. Zevin goes a long way no painting any of the females into the role of villain just as much as she doesn't completely dump Aviva into the victim category either. We all make mistakes in our lives, and we are, to a certain extent, defined by how we handle ourselves in the face of those mistakes despite certain standards being forced upon one sex over another in some cases. One person is not necessarily strong than another based on the choices they make, just different perspectives.

I enjoyed this story, and I'll definitely be looking into reading more books by Gabrielle Zevin.

YOUNG JANE YOUNG by Gabrielle Zevin was chosen as the Library Reads top pick for August 2017 and has a starred review from Kirkus, but I much prefer Zevin's young adult novels like Elsewhere and enjoyed her The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, as did many readers. Based on such positive reviews, YOUNG JANE YOUNG will likely create interest, particularly for those from Miami or who want to read (and laugh) about an overbearing Jewish mother and the impact of youthful mistakes. The novel is set in both Florida and Maine and is told by several narrators. First is Ruth Shapiro, mother of Aviva Grossman, a 20-something intern who has an affair with a married congressman. Several years later, Ruby Young, Aviva's daughter picks up the story in a series of emails to a middle school pen pal. Ruby eventually meets another narrator, Embeth Levin, who is the congressman's wife. Finally, we hear from Aviva/Jane who tells her side of the story using a "create-your-own-adventure" framework. Obviously, Zevin is a very talented writer and there were clever and funny moments in YOUNG JANE YOUNG, along which social commentary on our preoccupation with political scandal and apportioning blame. While some of that content was uncomfortable, it also took some time to adjust to the voice of each narrator and once I had done so, the storyteller abruptly switched; honestly, I would tend to recommend her other titles first.

Previous review on Zevin's writing:
http://treviansbookit.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-storied-life-of-j-fikry-by.html

3.5-3.75 stars.

I really enjoyed this book's unconventional format -- the choose-your-own-adventure chapter was particularly well done -- and was intrigued by the provocative subject matter. However, it was a bit of a let down; I had hoped that Zevin would add something more to the trope.
Ultimately, "Young Jane Young" was fun and entertaining, if not as thought-provoking as I had hoped.

First Line - My dear friend, Roz Horowitz met her husband online dating, and Roz is three years older, and fifty pounds heaver than I am, and people have said not as well preserved, so I thought I would try it even though I avoid going online too much.

Summary - Aviva Grossman, an ambitious congressional intern in Florida, makes the mistake of having an affair with her boss--and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the beloved congressman doesn’t take the fall. But Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins: slut-shamed, she becomes a late-night talk show punch line, anathema to politics. She sees no way out but to change her name and move to a remote town in Maine. This time, she tries to be smarter about her life and strives to raise her daughter, Ruby, to be strong and confident. But when, at the urging of others, Aviva decides to run for public office herself, that long-ago mistake trails her via the Internet and catches up--an inescapable scarlet A. In the digital age, the past is never, ever, truly past. And it’s only a matter of time until Ruby finds out who her mother was and is forced to reconcile that person with the one she knows.

Highlights - Zevin has a way of writing about peoples flaws that feels very natural. You find yourself rooting for all the characters, and it doesn't matter if you like them or not.

Lowlights - There were times where the story felt like it was being drawn out more than it needed to be.

FYI - Sexual situations and some strong language.

There is an “event” in “Young Jane Young” by Gabrielle Zevin. A dramatic event that makes sensational headlines, brings unrelenting paparazzi, and causes punishing trauma, and stress. This book is not about the event, although it plays a pivotal role. “Young Jane Young is about the people, all the people, who are touched by this event. What happens to the players, their families, their acquaintances, and themselves? How they adapt, change, and cope? Can they move on?
Each section of book is told from a different point of view and each section is by person labeled for easy identification. The plot is mostly dialogue driven, and readers get to know all the players, and what those players think about everyone else. The writing style adapts to match the personality of each character, and includes first person narrative, third person, e-mail correspondence, even a “choose your own adventure.”
The casual conversational style draws readers into the characters, so it is almost like talking to friends who live next door. We meet Rachel, divorced, age 64, living in Florida, her daughter Aviva Grossman, who has a problem. We meet her neighbor, Embeth, her husband Aaron, the congressman, and Embeth’s parrot, El Meté. In addition, we meet Jane Young, an event planner who lives in in Maine and her daughter Ruby, who is participating in a “Friends Around the World” pen pal program.
What readers learn is that everyone has secrets, and that a little crisis for one mutates into big problems for others. Jane laments, “The past is never past. Only idiots think that.” Rachael sums it all up, “When someone tells you ‘it’s not what it looks like,’ it’s almost always exactly what it looks like. The key to happiness is knowing when to keep your mouth shut.”
I received a copy of “Young Jane Young” from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Gabrielle Zevin, and Net Galley, and I absolutely loved it. The characters were compelling and believable. Zevin’s writing style kept each character and story segment appealing and engaging. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

A story about starting over and adolescence, wrapped inside a topical look at a political scandal and how it is affected by gender

Elsewhere, A.J. Fikry - books I've loved by Zevin. This sounded so very different yet just as intriguing.

Aviva Grossman, as a young intern, had an affair with a married congressman. Found it, it was Aviva who bore the brunt of the media attacks. Changing her name and moving away, she has a thriving business and a teenage daughter. Who is about to find out about her mother's past.

A dual story about mother and daughter, about the past and present, 'Jane' shows us her perspective of what happened and just how inaccurate media portrayals can be. Ruby, her daughter, is a bright adolescent who must decide for herself what to believe and how she feels about her family history.

It's well composed and moves nicely between time periods, the idea of blaming women for such affairs a current one, especially as it is also compared in the book to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky example.

This will be excellent for discussion with teenagers in classes or book groups, and is certainly suitable for adults as well.

I enjoyed the idea of reinvention, and of Aviva/Jane moving on with her life. There are some mysteries to Ruby's story and the story wraps them up nicely just at the close.

With some sexual content, this is best suited to KS3 and above, ideally ages 14 and over.

With thanks to Netgalley for the advance e-copy.

I read The Storied Life of AJ Fikry last year and loved it, so I was excited to receive an ARC for Young Jane Young. I wasn't disappointed. The characters were quirky, likable, and real and I was easily sucked into the story. This author's writing style reminds me of another one of my favorites, Rainbow Rowell, in that it's unusual, original, and quirky and I'm always sorry to see it end. I can see how she's able to write both adult and YA fiction, just like Rowell. I definitely want to check out her YA. Highly recommend!

Thank you, Netgalley, for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Interesting take on the Monica Lewinsky story. Gives some insight on political interns.

3.75 stars.
This book started out great for me, but fizzled a little in the second half. The beginning hooked me right away with Rachel reflecting on her life and dating again. Rachel lived where my father used to play golf, and shopped where I used to buy fruit, so that was a fun connection. Rachel and her daughter are estranged, but we don't know why at the beginning. The rest of the book lays out the reason(s) why- her daughter, Aviva, had been involved in a scandal when she has "relations" with a politician. What's left for Aviva to do, but move away and change her name. The second part of the book is about Aviva and her daughter's lives, including her daughter's emails to her penpal in Indonesia.

The author that gave us A.J. Fikry is back with more flawed, but endearing characters. Zevin manages to infuse humor and heart with a plot-line not for the faint of heart. A refreshingly honest take on the foibles of being human, and making mistakes.

Gabrielle Zevin is a master at broadly outlining a compelling tale that hits the perfect spot: family life crossed with American politics writ large served up in a community setting that is immediately recognizable to readers. She then offers up multiple generations as touchstones to the outlandish action that sets the plot in motion; namely the affair between the intern and the politician. Loosely modeled after the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, this fictional version offers just enough to allow the author an opportunity to see what would happen downstream of the event. It's a fascinating idea and an attractive plot. Yet, much like my reaction to her previous book, I found this one unfulfilling. So many potential story ideas were opened and left that way. The different perspectives were not as compelling as I thought they would have been. The characters themselves were not that interesting. The best was the child of the now grown-up intern; she was a delight. Were the characters intentionally uninteresting or did the author just not do enough with them? I don't know. This is the second book of hers where I've had a similar response on the writing style. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Let's just get this out of the way: readers looking for another warm, quirky Storied Life of AJ Fikrey will be disappointed. I give credit to Ms. Zevin for not trying to write the same book twice, but I'm not sure quite what to make of Young Jane Young.

The novel centers around a fictional, South Florida version of Monica Lewinsky named Aviva Grossman. The point of view switches from Aviva's mother Rachel, to Aviva ten years after the scandal (highly successful at a surprising profession), her precocious daughter Ruby, the wife of the congressman who was caught with Aviva, and then finally Aviva's confessional about the affair. The first four sections are primarily set up for the last one, which uses a semi "Choose Your Own Adventure" format to show that, despite the power imbalance between Aviva and the congressman, she made choices along the way that contributed to the affair and subsequent disgrace. But there's also a strong feminist strain running through the book, and the suggestion that, instead of scorning Aviva (and Monica) for setting back feminism by fifty years, her fellow women should have supported and helped her instead.

The book is occasionally humorous (especially in the emails Aviva's daughter exchanges with a Malaysian pen pal) and the dialogue is frequently sharp and biting. I'm not sure what Zevin was hoping to accomplish with this novel but it made me remember that Monica Lewinsky was (and remains) more than a victim or a punchline. Wherever she is now, I hope she has found peace.

What a good story! I'm so glad I got to read this one. I will definitly recommend this to many readers!

This was a quick, enjoyable read. I loved the various perspectives from the women in the story. I didn't know what the story was about when I started it, but I was quickly drawn into the story and couldn't put it down. Will definitely recommend to patrons.

Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for the digital advanced reader copy - all opinions are my own.

Thank you to Young Jane Young (read the synopsis here) for getting me so engrossed that I didn’t realize I’d power-walked through an entire hour on the treadmill without even blinking! Gabrielle Zevin (also wrote The Storied Life of AJ Fikry) is back with a story about a young lady who gets caught up with the congressman she is interning under (think Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton), and the repercussions that follow that steamy affair. Interestingly, Zevin doesn’t spend much time on the man of the story; instead, she tells the tale through the eyes of the women themselves - Aviva/Jane; her mother, Rachel; her daughter, Ruby; and Embeth, the wife of the congressman.

I loved how this book emphasized the misogynistic culture that’s so prevalent right now. Men and women are viewed completely different when it’s found out that they’re involved in a sex scandal. In Young Jane Young, the congressman’s life carries on as normal, yet Aviva/Jane has no choice but to start completely over in a new area of the country. People won’t hire her or give her a chance once they realize who she is. I think this definitely parallels much of what we know about the entire Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton scandal.

I liked the characters in this story. Jane was strong, resilient, and smart. She started her own company when it became clear people weren’t interested in hiring someone tied to such a well-known scandal. She was a wonderful role model for her daughter - raising her to be strong-willed and independent, too. Her mother, Rachel, seemed to be a little slightly in the beginning and made some questionable choices given the circumstances, but by the end of the novel, she’d totally redeemed herself.

The only time I really caught myself annoyed with the story is when Ruby runs away. It didn't feel like a realistic addition to the story; however, I understand that Zevin needed an event to bring Aviva/Jane and her mother full circle. This accomplished that goal.

Overall, this was a fun, quick read that reinvents the details of an infamous sex scandal many of us grew up with. It emphasized the power, strength, independence, and resiliency of women. It teaches us to own our mistakes and the lessons they provide - then to make ourselves better because of the experience.

**Link to blog post to come**

The initial part of this book is narrated by Rachel Shapiro, a 64-year-old divorced woman in Boca Raton, Florida, who is looking for a new relationship via internet matches. But the story turns out not really to be about Rachel at all, but about her daughter Aviva Grossman.

Aviva was 20 when she fell in love with Congressman Aaron Levin while working as an intern in his office in Miami. They had an affair which got exposed, becoming a news obsession in South Florida (“Avivagate”) until the catastrophe on September 11 finally took the affair off the front pages.

But nothing dies on the internet, and Aviva couldn’t escape her past; she couldn’t even get a job; all anyone had to do was google her name. Even worse:

“Because it was an election year, the congressman’s staff took great pains to distance itself from Aviva. They characterized her as the Lolita intern, a Lewinsky wannabe, and a variety of other synonyms for ‘slutty.’”

Unfortunately, as one might expect, the Congressman came out of it unscathed, while Aviva might as well have had a scarlet letter on her chest.

She decided the only escape was to get a new name in a new state, and the story continues fifteen years later with narration by “Jane Young,” who is the former Aviva:

“My name is Jane Young. I am thirty-three years old, and I am an event planner, though my business mainly consists of weddings. I was raised in South Florida, but I now reside in Allison Springs, Maine, which is about twenty-five minutes from Portland and which is a popular summer spot for destination weddings.”

Because Allison Springs is a relatively small town, Jane finds out everyone’s secrets:

“People were often the worst versions of themselves in the months leading up to a wedding. Occasionally, though, the worst version of someone was the actual version of someone, but it was difficult to know if one was in that situation until after the fact.”

Jane is also the single mom of a precocious daughter, Ruby. Ruby helps out her mom as an assistant (Jane reports Ruby’s first word was “canapé.”). Like Jane and Rachel, Ruby is perceptive, sarcastic, and has an excellent sense of humor.

When Ruby is 13, she becomes pen pals with an Indonesian girl, Fatima, and the narration again switches to Ruby, sometimes in the form of her very amusing letters to Fatima. She explains to Fatima that her mom, now 37, is running for mayor of Allison Springs.

Ruby also confesses to Fatima that she has started to think about her dad. She asks Jane for more information, and Jane tells her he was a one-night stand named Mariano Donatello who died in a car accident. But Ruby can’t find anything about that name on the internet (the web being a recurring character itself in this story). Then she figures out her mom is Aviva Grossman. She is appalled that her mom is “a BIG liar and a disgrace.” She is angry and hurt at being lied to her whole life.” She accuses her mother of “daughter fraud” - lying to her daughter, not to mention of “voter fraud” - lying to the voters. She decides Congressman Levin must be her real father, and chaos ensues.

Near the end of the book the narration switches to Embeth, the long-suffering wife of the congressman. Embeth is a surprisingly sympathetic character, and is also quite funny. She observes, “There had been times when Aaron had let her down as a husband, but she could honestly say he had never let her down as a congressman.” But in “the irony to end all ironies,” Embeth loved Aaron. She felt that it wasn’t being cheated on that was so bad, it was having it be public. “She still, fifteen years later, wondered if they judged her for staying with him after Avivagate.”

All of the characters come to a reckoning as the threads of their stories coalesce. It may sound as if it is a tragic story, and in terms of the disparate treatment of gender by society, and double standards that still prevail, it certainly is. But the mood is so light and so full of wit, it is hard to feel anything but happy while reading this entertaining story. The ending is well done, and quite satisfactory.

Discussion: I love some of the insights revealed by the characters. For example, Jane muses:

“I was overweight when I was her age, and my mother discussed it exhaustively. And yes, as a result, I would say I am the proud owner of several complexes. But who isn’t? When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?”

Jane also understood that, being older, her memories of what happened with the congressman were not so bad:

“Maybe, despite everything, I think kindly of Levin because I knew him when I was easily impressed, because I knew him when I was young.”

Evaluation: I haven’t read all of the books by this author (I’m not sure why not), but I have loved every one I have read. They have all been heavily dosed with waggish humor both subtle and overt, with unexpected plot twists, and clever dialogue. In addition, they have been about the never-boring exploration of love in its different forms and permutations over the years. This book would also be an excellent choice for book clubs.

Truthfully, I wanted to read this book simply based on the fact that I adored the author's previous book, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and I don't think I'd really read the plot description before diving into this one. The story is told in sections from different points of view from the women in Jane Young's life, and while some perspectives are more interesting/engaging than others (reading the first section, I wasn't sure what to make of the book), overall this is a compelling story. It's a great examination of the expectations and double standards put upon women, of the boxes that women are placed into, and about relationships between women. This is going to be a wonderful book club recommendation, as well as accessible for older teens and adults alike.