PLAIN JANE

Jane Singer, a Jewish woman living in Cleveland, ponders her troubles, among them her lack of love for her fiance, her father's failure to communicate, and her brother's dishonesty

YA-- Jane Singer, the first-person narrator of this angst-ridden coming-of-age novel, is filled with adolescent ambivalence as she seeks to deny the painful truth about her father's unpredictable rages. After graduating from high school with honors, she becomes engaged to a man she doesn't love and works at a job that feeds her unrealistic fantasies. Her therapist is able to free her of suicidal tendencies, but fails to free her from obsessive guilt. Jane possesses the unforgiving eye and keen wit of her favorite fictional character, Holden Caulfield. Her sardonic descriptions of her promiscuous older sister, reformed by marriage to an orthodox Jew, and the poignant account of her father's rare moments of gentleness underline her own pain. True insight comes with the inevitable breakup of her parents' marriage. Jane is then able to acknowledge her own role in the unhealthy family dynamic, appreciate her self-worth, make constructive plans for the future, and reach out to her emotionally scarred younger brother.
- Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jane Singer, 19, thinks she's plain; she hates her body, and doesn't care much for her face, either. She's wrong about her appearance, but it's undeniable that her plainspoken opinions get her into trouble. Jane is an engaging narrator, treating the reader to a funny, touching coming-of-age story that marks first novelist Horowitz as a remarkably accomplished writer. The middle child in a dysfunctional Cleveland family, Jane has learned to deflect her autocratic father's temper tantrums in order to earn his love; her emotionally distant mother is showing the strain and will soon ask for a divorce. The youngest sibling, 12-year-old Willie, a chronic liar, is away at a school for problem kids. Jane is sure that she caused Willie's problems; she has expressed her guilt only to a psychiatrist, with whom she thinks she is in love, although she becomes engaged to someone else. Her older sister, Caroline, has astonished the nearly assimilated Singer family by marrying an Orthodox Jewish doctor. Refracted through Jane's wickedly observant eye and acerbic wit, the contrasting behavior of Caroline's in-laws and the secularized Singers is an iconoclastic, often hilarious social portrait. Horowitz artfully depicts her characters' foibles and society's shams in a perfectly controlled narrative whose insights are expressed with poignant resonance. Literary Guild selection .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Plain Jane Singer, the star of this irreverent--and irresistible--first novel, is a wry, romantic, Jewish truth-teller. With her finely tuned, built-in radar for phonies, she's an updated, female Holden Caulfield from Cleveland. Jane, the valedictorian of her high-school class, has sidestepped college for a secretarial job in a psychiatrist's office. She wants to remain close to Dr. Stevens, her onetime shrink and heartthrob. Also, it seems important to be at home, keeping an eye on things these days when her once close-knit family appears to be unraveling dramatically. It all started with Jane's older sister Caroline getting married to Jonathan Klausner, a doctor from an Orthodox family in New York. Already, Caroline has become more Klausner than Singer, disdaining her own family's customs, following her new mother-in-law's heavy recipes, saying ``Pesach'' instead of ``Passover,'' pretending to be virginal after her promiscuous Cleveland days. After this initial family defection, others follow in the form of death and imminent divorce. Jane stitches as fast as she can in a hopeless effort to patch her family back together. Meanwhile, she's feeling the weight of a couple of guilty secrets she's carrying around: She's engaged to a man she doesn't love, and, worst of all, she's sure she's responsible for the trauma that has affected her younger brother, Willy, making him a kind of pathological fibber. Oy. Just how much responsibility can one smart, sassy, 19-year-old mensch be expected to take? Luckily, Jane figures out the answer. And by novel's end, she's well on her indomitable way to figuring out the rest of her life. When she does, watch out. A plum of a first novel--ripe, juicy, and not exactly strictly kosher. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.