Mary Marie

Mary Marie Anderson is thirteen years old, and she has made a delightful discovery: her parents are divorced, which means she gets to live two separate lives. In 1920, this is practically revolutionary. Most of her friends have never even met a child with divorced parents. From her father's house she is Mary; from her mother's she is Marie. She begins her diary with the giddy realization that her life is finally, wonderfully, different. What follows is the charming, sometimes bittersweet account of a girl learning to exist in two worlds. Her father is one kind of person, her mother another entirely. She must navigate their different expectations, their separate homes, and the strange ache of loving two versions of family that no longer speak to each other. Porter captures the peculiar wisdom of childhood, the way a young girl can sense the adult world's fractures even while insisting everything will be fine. The diary format makes it intimate, funny, and occasionally devastating. This is a quiet revolutionary text: a 1920s novel that takes a divorced family seriously, letting a child tell her own story in her own words. For readers who loved Anne of Green Gables and want another diary-based coming-of-age story, but one that grapples honestly with family fracture.