Author: Cecil Castellucci
Publisher: Minx
Rating: Worthy!
Illustrator: Jim Rugg
Lettering: Jared K Fletcher
The Plain Janes is not what I expected, but pleasantly so. Cecil Castellucci has created a charming story about Jane, a girl who survives what might be 9/11, but might be "just another" terrorist bombing in Metro City, and is urgently transported outside the city by her parents, who think it's safer in suburbia. I had thought that "Cecil" was a guy since you don't normally encounter that name for girls, but she's very much a girl, and I suspect that there's some autobiographical content in this novel.
Note that although the cover is in color, the novel is line drawings and gray-scale. The artwork is oddly appealing despite its initial appearance of simplicity and the rudimentary aura it gives off to begin with.
Jane is heartbroken to leave her friends and especially the John Doe patient who saved her life and now lies in a coma at the hospital. She visits him regularly and talks to him, but now she can visit no more: he's too far away. She did purloin his half-filled art sketch pad however, vowing to fill it on his behalf, which seems a bit presumptuous to me. Turning lemons into lemonade, Jane decides on a mini-make-over. She cuts her hair, dyeing it black so she can start her new school with a new perspective.
Shunning the popular girls at lunchtime, Jane sits at a table of apparent "loser" girls, who may or may not like her sitting with them, but who curiously are all named Jane. These girls are smart, talented in different fields, and poor socializers. Jane eventually gets them talking and lures them into joining her in an art project.
On am empty lot which has been set aside for a strip mall, the four girls build three quite large pyramids out of rubble one night, modeled on those a Gizeh in Egypt. They post a sign announcing that the pyramids have lasted for thousands of years, and asking how long the proposed strip mall will last. The sign is signed People Loving Art In Neighborhoods (P.L.A.I.N.), and so is born The Plain Janes.
As the PJs take on more anonymous projects, they garner for themselves a reputation, and start bonding and enjoying their lives for once. Their reputation is oddly a bad thing, seen by the school authorities as destructive and as vandalism, even though it is, er, PLAINly not. One big weakness of this novel is that Castellucci offers no reason at all as to why this should be. The PLAIN artist could be anyone or any group, yet it quickly comes down to an assumption that someone at school is doing this, and a psycho cop comes to the school and gives a lecture about this "vandalism" and vows to run down the perps. I thought that this was an unnecessary slur on the police.
There is a side story about a non-existent "romance" between Jane and a guy at school where neither side seems interested in becoming involved, and there's a weird, rather inexplicable ending, which took away from the story for me and made it rather weak in the finale, but overall this was a good story with very positive vibes and I recommend it.
