Book Review of Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan

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Type of book: England, summer of 1976, LGBtQ, relationships fragments, character study, microaggressions towards Judaism, outsider vs conformity, high school, desires, trauma, 

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Summary:

Characters:

Main character is Jean, a seventeen year old or so boy who is best described as extremely angry and aggressive and sees himself as an outsider in everyway. Jean is blonde haired and blue eyed and is Jewish. He grew up without a father and his mother has done very little in grounding him in either background. Jean focuses a lot on his outsider aspect and often strikes me as angry and selfish individual. He has experienced a lot of trauma though. Secondary characters are Tom and Jean's mother. Tom is Jean's friend and Tom comes from a very grounded family. Tom also tends to take advantage of Jean's status and lack of knowledge. Tom is talkative and desires to experience more life than he is being offered. I definitely wish that I could have learned more of Jean's mom than is given in the novel. His mom is Jewish but rejects her Jewishness and I get the impression that she thinks her son will escape the microaggressions that she has experienced. She and Jean have a relationship that is similar to a Category 5 hurricane. She takes advantage of Jean and is extremely abusive and mean to him, but at the same time she is blind to what she is doing. 

Theme:

I read it from cover to cover and am not sure what lesson is. Perhaps how outsiders feel like outsiders no matter what?

Plot:

The story is in third person narrative from Jean's point of view. It begins in a delinquent school and tends to go back and forth between Jean's present and his past, namely the instances of experiences that created his understanding of love. I think this is a more of a character study rather than a story with a plot or character growth. Jean seems fragmentary and broken rather than whole and imperfect. Personally I would have liked a lot more exploration into Jeans mother's view of Jewishness why she never taught and rejected an integral part of her, especially considering how the world sees and treats Jews for more than two millennia. (In Nazi Germany, no matter appearance or assimilation a Jew always remains a Jew, and that hasn't changed.) I did appreciate the mention of microaggressions that Jean experiences as a Jew which felt realistic to me. Also no quotation marks for those who are bothered by that. 

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Opinion:

I definitely had a tough time understanding the book. Both the character and I share the similar ancestry and by all means I should have found things in common with him. But I don't think I could. I think when it comes to this read its important to examine one's expectations of the story and realize that the story will subvert them. When it comes to JEAN my expectations were that either its a slow story of falling in love and questioning its nature, or that its wrestling with being Jewish in a christian world and being LGBtQ. My expectations were subverted though because it didn't feel like a romantic queer story and the author barely touched on the characters' Jewishness aside from occasional microaggressions. What the author did touch upon are messed up relationships between Jean and his mother as well as an older male and between Jean and a boy named Tom. This didn't strike me as a book where character can fall in love, and I am not sure if its because the boys' love looks different than women's love or if because I rarely if ever read books that feature men who are LGBtQ. 

This was given for review

4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)