Our contributor Julie Weinstein has been kind enough to write two reviews for us – what follows is her second – and we hope you’ll follow suit and tell us about the books which have moved you, inspired you, or made you laugh (or even made you wish you hadn’t bothered).  Send it to admin@awordwithyoupress. We’ll post it and perhaps we’ll enjoy a lively discussion about it in the Comments section. You never know; you might start a literary landslide. At any rate, here’s Julie’s review – Geronimo!

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Musical Chairs by Jen Knox
Reviewed by Julie Weinstein

Jen Knox’ memoir, Musical Chairs, is an uplifting, hard-knocks story of independence and of facing one’s fears. The book opens with Jen as a teenager, living in a house that’s falling apart at the seams as her parents’ marriage begins to crumble. She is a witness to a home that is slowly divided up in quarters as her parents each carve a space of their own. Jen is weighted down by their silences and what is not said between them. This is juxtaposed against another side of Jen, who is creating her own space and struggling to find herself as an adolescent girl and as a woman.

Jen learns the value of running as an athlete from her Dad, and also as an escape mechanism from her great grandmother, whom she’s heard about in family legends. And so she becomes a runaway teenager living life on her terms. She camps out at her boyfriend’s house and at friends’ houses, but doesn’t cave into others’ whims, or even to the notion of what home means, finding a safety net of one’s own. This notion is at first too alien and foreign and, ultimately, too threatening. When she does finally contact her parents, it’s to let them know she’s safe, even though they offer to let her live with them at their respective homes.  Jen says no, and later, when she questions her own sanity and wonders if she might have inherited her grandma’s mental illness, she voluntarily checks herself into a center for troubled teens.  Jen knows she’s in the wrong place, though in some way it’s the right place. Once there, she finds the seed for reading, and gains more humanity and a part of herself, even though she’ll keep on running.

Lured by the hope of fast money and the sense of power that her own sexuality brings, Jen rises, then falls, as a stripper as she attempts to escape the hard life through booze binges. She says goodbye to the stripper life, rekindles relations with both parents, yet still has the urge to run. She hops from one job to the next on a path towards a college education. Along the way, she settles down and wonders again about her own sanity as her fear catches up with her in the form of panic attacks.  The ironic thing is that, as her life gets calmer, the old fears of not being safe find her, even though she discovers a home of her own making. It is what makes this story all the more human and real. For all its gritty edges, Jen has an unshakable confidence and knows that if things get bad enough, she can always run. Yet it’s the staying with her own fear, her panic, that gives her the most courage as she welcomes in romantic love and forms a tight friendship with her grandma.  Jen learns that running runs deep in her family, but that some things – like love – you can run toward, instead of running away.