Maxine Banks Is Getting Married (review)

Jealous of a friend's new marriage, seventeen-year-old Maxine convinces her longterm boyfriend Brian that they need to jump the broom themselves, eliciting parental support with a lie about being pregnant. Brian's notoriously strict dad maintains control over the situation by giving the newlyweds a house and helping them financially, but Brian begins to drift even before the ceremony, spending more and more time with a girl named Shell. Soon Shell turns up with a genuine baby bump, and Brian moves out mere months after the wedding; a heartbroken Maxine then accepts Brian's dad's offer to look after his wild thirteen-year-old niece Demonee in exchange for rent and expenses. Demonee is a handful, but Maxine is sympathetic, especially when she finds out the real reason Demonee's family has rejected her: she's a lesbian. Situations change so quickly in the narrative that it invokes readerly whiplash; Maxine's ability to convince everyone, especially Brian, to go through with the wedding more than strains credulity. Nearly all of the exposition comes through repetitive dialogues about Maxine's choices and their consequences, and this becomes tedious, not least because of a certain stiffness in the dialect, which at times is an awkward combination of slang and formally inflected diction. Maxine's character is credible, though, in her immaturity and her frantic desires; for instance, she has real empathy for Demonee because of her own circumstances, but she never takes responsibility for her bad decisions, choosing instead to blame Brian for capitulating to her bossiness and then walking away from a marriage that she insisted on. What reflection she does undertake is generated by feelings rather than thought, but it ultimately gets her to same place as she realizes that the marriage was indeed foolish because of the hurt it caused. Readers who lead with their hearts rather than their heads will empathize with Maxine's cover-to-cover emotion-fest.