Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
You think you're a body, but you're not--you're a kind of electricity, though you've got to fill the right body to go anywhere, do anything important. That's how seventeen-year-old Jane explains it to herself.
Manipulated by her mother and urged by the voice of her dead twin brother, Benjamin, Jane hits her father with a crowbar, leaves him for dead in an irrigation ditch, and escapes to San Francisco.
It's 1937, the height of the Great Depression, and there are almost no jobs for girls, so Jane turns herself into Benny and gets hired as a newspaper copy boy. She soon begins to climb the ladder at the paper, gaining validation, skill, and connections with the artists and thinkers of her day; but then her father appears on the paper's front page, his arm around a girl who was just beaten into a coma one block from Jane's newspaper--hit in the head with a crowbar.
Jane's got to find her father before he finds her, and before everyone else finds her out. She's got to protect her invented identity. This is what she thinks she wants. It's definitely what her dead brother wants.
Synopsis
"This is Raymond Chandler for feminists." ―Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra "An expressive and striking story that examines what one does for family and for oneself." ―Kirkus Reviews
Jane's a very brave boy. And a very difficult girl. She'll become a remarkable woman, an icon of her century, but that's a long way off.
Not my fault, she thinks, dropping a bloody crowbar in the irrigation ditch after Daddy. She steals Momma's Ford and escapes to Depression-era San Francisco, where she fakes her way into work as a newspaper copy boy.
Everything's looking up. She's climbing the ladder at the paper, winning validation, skill, and connections with the artists and thinkers of her day. But then Daddy reappears on the paper's front page, his arm around a girl who's just been beaten into a coma one block from Jane's newspaper―hit in the head with a crowbar.
Jane's got to find Daddy before he finds her, and before everyone else finds her out. She's got to protect her invented identity. This is what she thinks she wants. It's definitely what her dead brother wants.
Synopsis
It's 1937. Jane has left her pregnant mother with a man she hates, left her father for dead in an irrigation ditch, remade herself as a man, and gotten a job as a copy boy. And everything's getting better--until her father turns up on her newspaper's front page in a picture that threatens to destroy the life she's making.