New Coming-of-Age Novel Offers the Surprising Story of a Teenage Girl’s Struggles

Susan Johnson’s Low Hanging Fruit is much more than just another girl’s coming-of-age story. And believe me, it’s not a good and good book with a happy ending. It is the very realistic story, at times almost uncomfortably realistic, of a teenage girl dealing with her parents’ divorce, her mother’s illness, and discovering her own sexuality.

Erica Tambo was fifteen years old in 1980 when she, her mother, her ten-year-old sister Ellie, and she moved to Leavenworth, Washington, a touristic Bavarian town two hours from their previous home in the Seattle area. Erica’s parents divorced after her mother developed breast cancer and her father was unable to deal with her mother’s illness. Now her father is remarrying, while Erica, her mother and her sister start a new and impoverished life.

There is nothing desirable about Erica’s new life. Her mother can’t find a job. They live in a small trailer. Erica manages to make friends, but not always the most desirable ones. Ella’s cousin Katie, a senior, takes care of her at first, and Erica develops a friendship with Lacy, but when Erica befriends Jenna as well, Lacy soon leaves her as friends with her. Jenna is perceived as a bad girl at school, she is promiscuous, smokes marijuana and lives alone for long periods while her father travels. However, Erica becomes friends with Jenna because Jenna is taking care of her father’s horses while he is away from her, and she agrees to give Erica riding lessons in exchange for Erica helping her take care of her horses. But this friendship soon puts Erica in precarious situations where she must make difficult decisions.

Erica is also starting to discover boys, but the boy she likes seems uninterested in her, and another boy just wants to take advantage of her. Erica has also been warned about the perverted teacher at school that she tries to avoid. In fact, Erica has no male role model in her life: her father is completely absent, except to invite her to her wedding, only to ignore her. Erica doesn’t even have a trusted adult to talk to because while her mother tries to be a good mother and provider, her previous illness, divorce, and the job she finally finds, where she has a mean and demanding boss, they wear it out so she’s always tired and, to my surprise, she’s not even opposed to Erica staying at Jenna’s house; Erica’s mother seems to be trying her best to get by, so Erica is largely left alone.

Eventually, a couple of Erica’s teachers take a positive interest in her, and Erica even writes an essay to enter a contest for a college scholarship. She ends up writing a costume story about Jenna, perhaps trying to make some sense of Jenna’s life. I won’t reveal the conclusion of the book, but it’s fair to say that Erica will discover that she has more in common with Jenna than she initially thought.

Johnson’s style is fast-paced, the story moving quickly over the course of a school year. I admire Johnson’s realism and his refusal to sugarcoat anything in this novel. I found that I could relate to Erica in many ways, since we all want love, but also because Erica loves to read the classics just like I do, and I grew up around the same time period as her, so I appreciated a lot of the books. popular. Cultural references to books, movies, television, songs and events from 1980-81. The poverty and emotional turmoil Erica deals with make the story quite dark, but never to the point where you want to stop reading. Nor could he have predicted the ending; in fact, Low Hanging Fruit is one of those books that leaves you wondering how such an ending could be possible, and yet it seems like the only possible ending. I was left wanting more, wanting to know what happens next to Erica, wanting to know that she will make it in life. It’s rare when a book has that kind of power.

Low Hanging Fruit offers what turns out to be an unusual and unexpected story. I think it would be eye-opening for many, especially teenagers who are just beginning to learn about the harsh realities of life, but also for adults; in fact, I think I really appreciated the story even more than I would have when I was fifteen. I was haunted by it long after I was done.