Publication Date: July 2, 2024
As the summer of his eighteenth birthday begins, Paul Nesbitt finalizes plans to escape his alcoholic, abusive father, enabling mother, and impoverished Jersey Shore town blanketed by the fumes of a chemical processing plant. Although the local police have Paul in their sights for a break-in and theft, he has been able to avoid arrest and has vowed to do his best to stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, his strategies are disrupted when he meets Laura, a vivacious young woman from the city, who takes an unexpected interest in him. To deepen her intrigue, he lies about himself. The biggest one is his acceptance into a very prestigious Ivy League college. But when the facade he’s created threatens to crumble, the only solution appears to be money. And the only way to get that money is for Paul to break his vow and take part in a very ambitious robbery that, if he’s not careful, may not only lead to his arrest but cause him to lose Laura.
The Girl from Jersey City by Zan A. Austin follows the story of 18-year-old Paul Nesbitt. Paul has spent all his life living in an impoverished Jersey Shore town with an alcoholic, abusive father, an enabling mother, and two younger siblings. Paul never thought much about who he wanted to be or what he wanted to do until the summer he met Laura, and everything changed.
Paul met Laura in Keansburg, where Laura’s parents owned a summer home. Despite the disapproval from her upper-class family, Laura and Paul quickly fell for each other. As the story continues, we see Paul struggle with trying to be the man he wants to be for Laura and returning to his old ways of stealing, brawling, and getting into trouble with the law.
The difference in social class causes a small rift in Paul and Laura’s relationship, which only grows when Laura moves back to her family’s home in Jersey City at the end of the summer.
Will Paul start making the changes necessary to distance himself from his past life of crime and deceit? Or will he remain subject to his circumstances? Readers follow along as Paul makes his decisions.
The Girl from Jersey City is similar to the beginning of Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook but with less romance, more violence, and crude behavior. For reasons I will outline below, I had to take 2 stars away from my rating for this book.
I’ll start with the book as a whole. I found it a bit hard to follow. The conversations read a bit choppy to me. They’d start and stop in random places. Sometimes, a story would start, and then, in the middle of it, the author would go off in another direction and never finish the original thought.
Second, the characters. We meet Paul’s sister and brother early on but hear very little from them again. Several other characters pop up, and it’s not clear what their importance to the story is.
Lastly, I felt the plot overall was a bit weak. Based on the description, it seemed like Laura would play more of a role in Paul’s life, and I expected Paul to undergo more transformation. Instead, I read 252 pages to find Paul’s most significant change was anti-climactic.
The Girl from Jersey City’s main takeaway is that even someone who has had all the cards dealt against him can decide to walk away from that life and start fresh.
Zan A. Austin is a Los Angeles-based writer and teacher. His novel End Man was published in October 2022 by Cursed Dragon Ship. His novel Nakamura Reality was published by The Permanent Press in 2016. Publishers Weekly gave Nakamura Reality a starred review and called the writing, “powerful and moving.” Kirkus Reviews recommended End Man as “An engrossing and well-crafted SF Tale with timely themes.” Austin was born and grew up in New Jersey, but then headed for California.
