It is here that we learn Enchanted likens herself to a mermaid.

Jackson doesn’t start at the moment that Enchanted and Korey meet, rather, we begin with Enchanted in her element as she grooves to a classic R&B hit while at swim practice. Enchanted, the seventeen-year-old wunderkind standing in this murder scene, is our focus because she’s the one alive to tell us what happened.įlipping between then and now, Grown carries the reader through the beginning of this tale. We know immediately that outside of his murder, he is not the point of the story we’ve been flung into the middle of with no seat belt to buckle us in. The novel opens with Korey dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. No, Grown is about Enchanted Jones and her survival.

Kelly that Jackson infuses into Grown are impossible to miss but this is not a story about the abuse his character stand-in, Korey Fields, inflicts on the young women he preys upon. Her storytelling has seen a convicted teen work to uncover the truth of a murder, a young girl search for her missing best friend, three hip-hop heads bring their murdered friend fame from the grave, and now a young woman with a beautiful voice must reclaim it after a well-known artist tries to smother it with his abuse in Grown. Young adult literature has been rightfully praised for its boundary-pushing authors and inclusive stories. Jackson’s Grown is a tour de force of voice, its suppression, and its reclamation through the story of Enchanted Jones and the trauma she survived.

Grown by tiffany d jackson review