Susan Johnson’s Low Hanging Fruit is so much more than just another girl’s coming-of-age story. And trust me, it’s not a good, good book with a happy ending. It is the very realistic, at times almost uncomfortably realistic, story of a teenager 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, and her ten-year-old sister Ellie moved to Leavenworth, Washington, a Bavarian resort 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 remarried, while Erica, her mother, and her sister begin a new, impoverished life.
There is nothing desirable in Erica’s new life. Her mother can’t find work. They live in a small trailer. Erica manages to make friends, but not always the most desirable ones. Her cousin Katie, a senior, babysits her at first, and Erica develops a friendship with Lacy, but when Erica befriends Jenna as well, Lacy soon drops her as a friend of hers. Perceived as a mean girl at school, Jenna is promiscuous, smokes marijuana, and lives alone for extended 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 guys, but the guy she likes seems uninterested in her, and another guy 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 be ignored. 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 demanding and mean boss, they exhaust it. so she’s always tired and, to my surprise, she doesn’t even object to Erica staying at Jenna’s house; Erica’s mother seems to do everything she can 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 disguised story about Jenna, perhaps trying to bring some meaning to Jenna’s life. I won’t reveal the book’s conclusion, 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 I could relate to Erica in many ways, since we all long for 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 of wanting to put it down. Nor could he have predicted the ending; in fact, Low Hanging Fruit is one of those books that ends up asking you 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 with 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 starting 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 finished.
