Book Review: M.V. Sexton Speaking

A Fair Trade Book

Title: M.V. Sexton Speaking

Author: Suzanne Newton

Date: 1981

Publisher: Ballantine (reprinted by Puffin)

ISBN: 0-449-70049-6

Length: 188 pages

Quote: "Thanks, Aunt Gert...For making me go to work. It has changed my life--and that's all I have to say!"

Martha Venable Sexton, an orphan living with her mother's much older sister, has demonstrated an excellent work ethic in school all year. In summer, she wants to rest and meditate on ways to become more popular at school. Instead her bossy, uptight aunt orders her to go out and apply for a job. Martha's application is clearly a bit of work-to-rule--she doesn't think she wants a job--but a neighborhood bakery hires her, anyway, because the proprietors are in debt and teenagers work cheap.

What follows is a mix of comic, serious, and pop-psychological upheavals. Martha starts buying her own clothes and shoes, without Aunt Gert making sure her choices are "sensible." She asks her aunt, and her mother's best school friend, questions about her parents. She rejects an older man who asks her for a date, and says yes to a boy she knows from school. We know she's going to be more popular in grade twelve than she was in grade eleven, and care less about being so. Basically she grows up--about one-tenth of the way.

In the 1980s adults had very mixed feelings about this and Suzanne Newton's other novel for teenagers. I can see why. During the course of this novel Martha doesn't learn any empathy or respect for her longsuffering aunt and uncle-by-marriage, nor does she learn to appreciate their moral standards. She doesn't really understand why she should reject the older man, except that she doesn't want to feel that she's reliving her mother's life--her father was older than her mother. She does learn to appreciate her employers, who are young and "fun," but...well, when teenagers start growing up, adults tend to have mixed feelings, but do they have to be quite as mixed as the feelings every adult reader always has about M.V. Sexton?

People who liked this book think it's realistic that it's going to take little M.V. more than one summer to be able to appreciate her aunt. I'll grant that, because it took me more than ten years to be able to appreciate my own father, at all, and I suspect part of the problem was that it really took until Dad went blind. 

Sometimes just the sight of young people sets off reactions that make it hard for older people to let the young be reconciled to us, even when they want to be. We look at teenagers who resemble their parents of the same sex, and we know we're supposed to see them as completely separate people from a different generation, but what we see looks just like that person our age who used to make us so angry or so envious or whatever--infatuated, even, in the case of opposite-sex parents. Maybe the last thing we want to do is project that kind of relationship, whatever it was, onto the young person and bring it back into our lives, but our eyes keep stirring up those memories, and there we are. Sometimes the only way some older people can deal with it is to keep pushing away whatever love and respect those teenagers have to offer, as long as our eyes keep bringing those memories to mind. So I can relate to the kids who say "I can't stand" some older relative. People say, "S/He has done something good for you." The kids do know that but they still can't stand that relative, and if that older person can be brought to admit it, he or she can't stand the sight of that kid. It's not fair, it's not right; it's life. In real life there are kids like M.V. who have kind, generous aunts like Gert, and they never are able to like each other.

If you are a girl who looks like your mother, and your mother is ill, and your father acts as if every other man on Earth wants you but he personally can't stand the sight of you, you're lucky; things could easily be a great deal worse. If you are a girl who looks like your mother, and your mother is dead, and your aunt acts as if she expects you'll always be a fool, you may never really bond with your aunt; things could easily be worse than that, too. Maybe those relationships will smooth out if the way you look changes a great deal--or if the older person loses his or her sight. Sometimes an extreme style makeover helps an older person see that you're not someone else, and then again sometimes the makeover activates a prejudice against people who try to make themselves over. Sometimes all you can do is understand that the reasons why some people don't like you are inside those people's heads, and do not indicate that the rest of the world will find you hard to like.

(I actually like my niece with the hearing loss, I want her to know. In her case it's not about which of the other beauty queens in the family are most easily confused with her in snapshots. It's just that, being such an ear thinker myself, I've never really hit it off with a deaf person. That's as much of a disability on my part as it is on the part of deaf people--but there we are. I'm deeply grateful that I've never had legal custody of her.)

People who did not like this book tend to ask why we have to read about that kind of relationship. Why couldn't Newton have written about an orphan who could have grown to appreciate her aunt after just a few weeks doing a job? I'll grant that, being an aunt, I'd prefer to read about that kind of orphan and that kind of aunt too. It's not pleasant for adults to admit that any teenager we know might need to see M.V.'s cheerful lack of a bond with Gert as a good example. The world would be a much nicer place if all motherless teenaged girls hit it off with their mother-surrogates as naturally as Dicey Tillerman and her Gram.

I recommend this novel mainly to adults who want a cheerful story about being young, with the wistful observation that it'd be nice if teenagers could still get a nice age-appropriate part-time job in a nice family-owned local business, where they inevitably learn sooo much more about business and life than they'd learn in ten years working for corporations. If I knew of a teenager who did have the opportunity to take a serious job where he or she might learn something useful, and wasn't eager to take the job, for that very special teenager I might recommend M.V.Sexton Speaking.

To buy it here, send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen. How many books will fit into one $5 package depends on which edition you get. The picture at the top of this post shows the pocket-size paperback, which is what I physically had while writing this review. Eight copies of it will ship for $5. The library-bound first edition, which your local library may have discarded because some adults didn't like it, was oversized; three copies would probably go for $5 but I'm not sure about more.