A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

A Grown Up Kind of Pretty is Joshilyn Jackson’s 2012 novel, told in the rotating voices of three generations of Mississippi women. Big, the matriarch, is forty five years old and trying to run a hair salon and hold her family together. Her daughter Liza, thirty, has just had a stroke and lost most of her speech. Her granddaughter Mosey, fifteen, is starting to ask questions that nobody in the family wants to answer. The novel opens when a backyard project unearths the bones of an infant, and the discovery sends all three women into a confrontation with secrets that have been buried for nearly half their lives.

Jackson is one of the strongest contemporary voices in southern fiction, and this novel shows her at the height of her powers. The three first person narrators are distinct from the first sentence. Big is sharp, weary, and trying to project competence she does not feel. Liza, locked inside her stroke damaged brain, narrates in fragments and flashes of memory that the reader has to piece together. Mosey is bright, suspicious, and finally old enough to start putting together what the silences in her family have been hiding.

The plot is constructed like a mystery, but the real subject is motherhood, addiction, and the complicated geography of a family where every generation has had to lie to the next one to keep them safe. Jackson handles these themes with humor and a sense of physical place that feels lived in rather than researched. The Mississippi small town setting is specific without being a postcard.

Readers who enjoy Sue Monk Kidd, Kristin Hannah, Joshilyn Jackson’s earlier novels, or the southern fiction of Wiley Cash will find a strong, satisfying read here. A Grown Up Kind of Pretty is one of those books that earns its melancholy ending and rewards the reader for paying attention.