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.

Aviva Grossman is “Florida’s answer to Monica Lewinsky”. A young Jewish intern in a congressman's office, she soon finds herself caught up in an affair with the older and married man. When the affair makes it into the regional media, Congressman Levin experiences some negative press, a few tut tuts, and then goes on to enjoy a lifetime in office. His marriage survives the scandal.

Aviva, on the other hand, has her life completely ruined. Though a skilled and qualified poli-sci graduate, no one will hire her. No one wants to date her. How dare she go after a married man, they say. Who wants to hire someone so morally challenged? Her only option is to start over somewhere completely new.

The story is obviously heavily-inspired by the famous Lewinsky scandal. Zevin exposes the misogyny and double standards that exist in politics, sex scandals, and in many areas of life. It's a fictional story, but it is hard not to notice the very real parallels - how Bill Clinton's marriage and career survived, how Lewinsky was torn apart by the media, and how even in the last election, almost twenty years after the scandal, jokes about Hillary not "blowing it" and how the last Clinton presidency "left a bad taste in [Lewinsky's] mouth" were extremely popular.

Aviva is, in many ways, Monica Lewinsky reimagined, not as a sexy seductress, but as a foolish young woman dazzled by a powerful older man. She is reimagined as someone's daughter, an ambitious student with a love of politics and, later, as a mother of a young girl herself.

It's a powerful feminist story. What I liked perhaps most of all was that all the women in this story are deeply flawed and make mistakes. The book is split between the perspectives of Aviva, her mother - Rachel, her daughter - Ruby, and Embeth - the congressman's wife. I really loved that the author chose to do this. The true heart of feminism is acknowledging the different experiences of different women, and the book's message was so much stronger with the inclusion of all these different perspectives.

There are so many great girl power quotes too, but I think it's best for the reader to discover them while reading. In short, it's just such a smart, warm and wonderful read, and an absolutely fantastic takedown of slut-shaming. I would recommend this for women of all ages.

I'd rate this 3.5 stars.

Living in the Washington, DC area during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, you just couldn't escape it—everything from news to gossip to rumors to hatchet pieces about Lewinsky, even spoofs of her on Saturday Night Live and other television shows. And while President Clinton certainly was the subject of a great deal of criticism, in many people's eyes, it seemed like Lewinsky was the only one to blame, and yet for quite some time you never heard her side of the story, but certainly her life was adversely affected.

In Gabrielle Zevin's Young Jane Young, Aviva Grossman interns for an up-and-coming Florida congressman with whom her family was friends when she was younger. Immensely smart and driven, with possible ambitions of a political career of her own someday, at first Aviva does the "typical" intern stuff—answer phones, send out mailings, make phone calls—but as she demonstrates her intelligence, the congressman and his staff begin relying on her for more serious tasks.

It's a few years after the Lewinsky scandal, but clearly Aviva didn't learn from that, as she and the congressman begin an affair. She knows it's wrong, but she falls in love with him, and she really believes him when he tells her that his marriage hasn't been happy for some time. Since she can't tell anyone about this, she keeps an anonymous blog about their relationship, this in the early days of blogging when she has no way of knowing if anyone is even reading what she writes.

When news of the affair becomes public, Aviva becomes a laughingstock. She can't get a job because of her "fame," her family is disgraced, and even graduate school seems a remote possibility because anyone with an internet connection can find out what she has done. She finds that she has no choice but to leave Florida and head far away, to Maine, where she changes her name to Jane Young and begins her life anew.

Years later, Jane has a successful event planning business and is raising her headstrong daughter Ruby to make smarter choices than she did. When Jane is convinced to run for mayor of her small Maine town, it's not long before her past is exposed. And when Ruby finds out that her mother isn't quite the person she believed she was, Ruby sets off a chain of events which bring Jane and her family back into a time of her life that she had tried putting behind her.

Young Jane Young is told from a number of different perspectives—not only Jane and Ruby's, but also Jane's mother, whose life was also affected by her daughter's scandal, and Embeth Levin, the congressman's wife. The narrative shifts from the time of the scandal to the present, and even includes a pseudo "Choose Your Adventure" section in which Aviva gets the opportunity to tell her side of the story.

This is a fascinating book which shows how quick we are as a society to rush to judgment about someone, even if that someone is our own family member, and how we often don't realize how many ripples a scandal can cause in other people's lives. It's also a book about owning your mistakes and trying to move on, but how sometimes you just can't outrun your past. Of course, it's also an exploration of the double standards that still pervade our society, double standards we've seen play out recently in our political arena here in the U.S.

I've read a few of Zevin's books in the past, with my favorite being The Storied Life of AJ Fikry (see my original review), which made my list of the best books I read in 2014. I really like the way she writes, and I like the way she made her characters fascinating despite their flaws.

I was frustrated by Ruby's actions after she discovers her mother's past. No matter how intelligent and independent Ruby was supposed to be, I just found the way she reacted and what she did a little unbelievable and immensely unlikable, despite understanding why she felt the way she did. The whole thing just seemed more melodramatic than the rest of the book, and it irked me.

Despite my irritation with a portion of the book, this was a very fast and enjoyable read, and an interesting look at the lifecycle of a scandal and its victims. Zevin's talent as a storyteller takes a familiar tale and makes it funny, fascinating, and a little soapy.

NetGalley and Algonquin Books provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

An absolutely delightful story about 3 generations of women. Warm smart characters with a humorous twist.
Couldn't put it down.

Aviva Grossman made some poor decisions in college that unfortunately became national news. She thinks all that nasty stuff from the past is good and buried, but a couple people find out and she has to figure out what to do. This all sounds terribly serious, and it is, but this book is also laugh out loud funny. Told from multiple character's points of view, this novel shows that even if you think you've screwed up big time, the people who truly love you will always have your back. Bonus: there are a lot of funny Yiddish terms in some parts, so you'll learn something too.

Young Jane Young is a whiz-bang of a book! Jane's mom, Rachel, starts the narration with humorous anecdotes about her life and that of her daughter, Aviva Grossman (You find out later how Aviva becomes Jane). Rachel is a typical modern mother worried about what Rachel will do with her life. How will she succeed? Who will she marry? Rachel throws in some Yiddish words for color, and we are off to the races.


Aviva lives in the dorm at her university in Miami, but she often goes up to see her parents who live in a gated community in Boca Raton. The story begins when Aviva, for lack of anything better to do, lands an internship with Congressman Aaron Levin. The first day does not go well. Aviva is called in to see her supervisor and told that she is expected to dress appropriately. It's not her fault that her mother's clothes are tight in places that perhaps they shouldn't be. But her mom helps out immediately by taking her shopping that night. Aviva now has a wardrobe that will save her from being looked at as "slutty."
After a series of misadventures with the congressman, Aviva lands in Maine with her daughter, Ruby. She changes her name to Jane Young and opens an event planning business. Life is hard, but she has escaped the limelight of the "slut shaming" that went on in Miami. Unfortunately, Google has made the indiscretion of a middle age congressman a life altering horror for a 22-year-old college graduate.
The substance of the novel is deadly serious. A young woman makes what most would say is a poor decision and she pays for it to the maximum. The congressman, not so much. Actually, he didn't suffer at all. There is a resemblance to the Monica Lewinsky affair here, and her name is even mentioned in the novel.
Gabrielle Zevin tells the story with ease; her writing is liquid gold. If ever I wanted someone to tell my story in a way that people would get the irony of it all, I would beg GZ to tackle it. This novel must be a hit!

I have really enjoyed Gabrielle Zevin's other books, especially The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and this book did not disappoint. The story revolves around an event that changes main character Aviva Grossman's life; her decision to have an affair with her Congressman boss. At the time Aviva is in her early 20s, a young intern swept away by the power & presence of the Congressman, & can't possibly imagine the lifelong notoriety that results from the fallout of the affair. Told in shifting perspectives, first from Aviva's mother, Aviva as she is in the present day, Aviva's young daughter as she discovers her mother's past, the Congressman's wife & then finally Aviva herself recalls the choices she made & what else she could have done at every turn to make her story turn out differently. A rich story with likable characters.

This novel started off with a terrific voice, as sixty-four-year-old Rachel reflects on her life, her story centering around her twenty-year-old daughter getting caught having an affair with a married senator. Of course when the story broke, the senator got off scot free, but the girl, Aviva, was ruined, and eventually had to move to another state, change her name, and invent another identity. Meanwhile Rachel copes with other messy aspects of life, including a mother who is not aging well. The flashbacks with the mother were especially poignant--I would have loved a section, or a whole story, about the mother.

We catch up with the daughter's new identity as Jane Young, the wedding planner, who has a young daughter named Ruby. Gradually, as we follow her new life in a small town in Maine, we learn that she is Aviva, who has cut herself off from her family and her Jewish heritage.

The point of view shifts three more times: first, we get emails to an Indonesia pen pal from 13 year old Ruby, and then a segment from the senator's put-upon wife, and finally we return to Aviva for a choose your own adventure, a narrative device that is clever for about three pages, and then goes on way too long, gradually leaching the promising depth and insight from the story and trundling it to the gimmicky end that does a rumpty-tump march for "female choice", though the entire story has been about female choice and its consequences.

In this novel, like the previous one, Zevin brings in a couple of familiar tropes, cancer suffering, and a kid who is so much a prodigy as to seem barely real. There was also a fantasy element that seemed awkwardly thrust in, and goes nowhere.

Overall this novel was a very fast read, the first half terrific, but the second half didn't live up to its promise for this reader.

I loved this book!!! Written in 3 voices and styles, the first a Philip Roth style stereotypical Jewish mother, the second the precocious tween told in emails to her Indonesian pen pal, and the final Jane Young, telling her story as a Choose Your Own Adventure. It was funny, heartbreaking, and left you saying, "Wait, I want to know more, what about..." My favorite Gabrielle Zevin so far.

Fun, fast read that addresses some really relevant issues in a light sort of way. Knowing what I did about the plot I expected this book to be a little more "heavy", but it was fairly light from start to finish. I loved that it was told from the perspectives of four different women and I absolutely loved reading from Ruby's perspective. The "choose your own" section at the end was really fresh. This was a fun read that kept the pages turning!

Really good. Multiple points of view are interesting.

I could have read this in one sitting if my life had allowed. I loved how Jane took charge of her life against the odds. In response to the question, How did you survive the scandal, she replied, I refused to be shamed. Jane is one of the strongest female protagonists I've read in a long time, apart from her daughter.

I thought the Choose Your Own Adventure segment was rich with analogy. She got stuck in making bad decisions and there are no do-overs - you simply cannot go back. She notes that the rub of Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if don't make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you're always good, the story will be very short.

We all know the senator took advantage of a young intern and then tossed her aside, but it's what she did with that situation that makes this book tick. I would beg for a sequel just for more of Ruby.

Young Jane Young shares the stories of four women who share a common situation. Through their voices the reader sees how choices and perceptions can define a person only if he/ she allows it. I enjoyed reading the book because the characters are real and I was drawn to see if each of them can find happiness despite choices from the past. Thank you NetGalley.

LibraryReads voted Young Jane Young as the book to read for July.