Review: In Zanesville

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lot of things happen in this one – it opens with two babysitters who discover their charges have lit the house on fire, and it chronicles most of an eighth grade year fraught with cliques and the discovery of boys – but the center of the book is our protagonist’s voice. Jo is distinct in her perspective and language, so insistent on making sense of the world changing around her, and so consistently funny, that she’s the star of the book even in the rare moments when nothing is happening to her.

Like the best adolescent characters – Tom Sawyer or Holden Caufield, for instance – Jo is neither a proto-adult nor an overgrown child. She’s trying to make sense of the world as it strikes her immediately, and the result is that she comes to conclusions that show up the hypocrisy (or silliness) of adults. She notices the way her teachers are both “weird” and human, how they leap at any chance to share their passions with students yet have so little sense of how to frame those passions. She watches as her mother does her best to deal with her alcoholic father, complaining about the problem but never quite rising to address it.

Such conclusions are only incidental, though. Jo’s real focus is on understanding her role as “sidekick” to her best and fellow not-quite-cool friend, Felicia. The two of them have depended on each other for years, babysitting as a team, backing each other up against one another’s mothers and older sisters, and standing as the hub of a clique of girls who rate somewhere below the self-confident cheerleaders.

At the beginning, Jo is happy to be the lesser light, the girl no one notices alongside the taller, prettier (at least in Jo’s own sweet appraisal), and more visible Felicia. As the year progresses, though, the girls discover the twin dangers of boys and cooler girls who seem intent on prying them apart. They assign one another crushes while they’re hanging out in detention, and then they begin getting invited to the cooler kids’ parties. Jo resents it when Felicia gets led away by a boy, and she reacts by pushing Felicia further away herself. It’s stuff that looks small, even quaint, when you look back on it as an adult, but it looms large and life-shaping in the moment. Beard, through Jo’s voice, captures that urgency without losing its simultaneous wonder and humor.

Jo is so drawn to making herself invisible that she never even reveals her name. There’s a brief passage late in the novel (p. 183) when she talks about sharing the name of a character in Little Women. It’s not Amy, she tells us, but rather someone who winds up as a character in another Alcott novel. Since “Jo” is the only major character to appear in both – and since the author is a Jo as well – it’s the reveal, so subtle that I’ve seen multiple reviewers claim our protagonist narrator is unnamed.

Beard manages to get a lot of balls in the air. There are three larger “chapters” each consisting of dozens of shorter, unnumbered sections, and the third of those, when the real danger of boys manifests itself, is more than half the novel. Within that, though, she ties most of the threads together in deeply satisfying fashion. Jo begins to understand herself as an artist, for instance and she envisions a bizarre sculpture – complete with her pet parakeet – that really does begin to make sense of her fractured world. Later, in a concluding scene that isn’t really a spoiler, she sees the moon in a way that begins to reconcile her to her father and that becomes an entree into the world of kissing and real boyfriends.

Again, though, it’s Jo’s voice that rings the loudest. As a coda to my thinking about this rich and fulfilling adolescent self-discovery, here are a few lines I particularly loved:

The abrupt transition: “In retrospect we probably should have quit band after the parade instead of during it.”

At a high school football game: “On the cinder track, a teetering hive of Zanesville cheerleaders forms – “Hey, hey, that’s okay, we’re gonna beat ’em anyway – and then collapses. One girl takes a running start and does a series of increasingly sagging backflips, spelling out Z-e-p-h-y-r-s. By the end she is nearly landing on her head.”

When a friend tries to help her deal with the cramps of her first period: “ ‘Not a uterus, a vagina,’ Maroni says. She pronounces it like her first name – Gina – shaking my confident.”

Or, in case you’re wavering about whether to give this a shot, the fabulous opening sentences: “We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed to be in charge here, so there’s a sense of somebody not doing their job.”


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