Torn Away by Jennifer Brown (review)

Residents of areas frequently beset by tornados are taught what to do and where to go when the alarms sound, but as Jersey Cameron observes, no one tells you what to do after a tornado destroys everything. Alone in her Missouri home when a particularly devastating twister blows through, Jersey survives as her home is flattened above her. She emerges to learn that most of her neighbors survived, but after nearly three days of wondering and worrying, she finds that her mother and her little sister have not, and that her stepfather is too lost in his grief to think straight. He ships her off to her birth father’s family, and when she can no longer tolerate their hard drinking and meanness, she runs away only to find herself deposited on the doorstep of her maternal grandparents, whom her mother hated and whom she therefore feels obligated to hate as well. With each relocation, Jersey learns things about her mother that upset her idea of who she was, and she has to discover for herself who her relatives really are. Deftly aligning reader emotions in perfect sync with Jersey’s, Brown portrays Jersey’s initial terror, stunned disbelief, frantic desperation, explosive rage, and ultimate acceptance with credible sensitivity, minimizing melodrama but clearly communicating that the aftermath of the tornado is just as battering as the event itself. The specific tragedy thus acts as a general framework for the expanding perspectives Jersey gains as she realizes that her mother was a complicated, imperfect person, that friends and neighbors sometimes close ranks around their own in times of stress, and that family is a matter of heart and choice rather than biology or obligation. As these life lessons reach across teen experience, this will have appeal far beyond the tornado-prone Midwest.