Grown is a triumphant story of a young girl reclaiming her voice

Tiffany D. 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.

Young adult literature has been rightfully praised for its boundary-pushing authors and inclusive stories. Tiffany D. Jackson is one such voice. 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.

The allusions to R. 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. No, Grown is about Enchanted Jones and her survival.

The novel opens with Korey dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. 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. 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.

Flipping between then and now, Grown carries the reader through the beginning of this tale. 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. It is here that we learn Enchanted likens herself to a mermaid.

She has the talent of song, the gift of lyricism, and a deep love for the water. As her father sees it, they are descended from fish. It explains why the beach feels more like home than the woods of the suburbs, and why Enchanted misses living with her grandmother where you can smell the ocean.

Clearly, Enchanted’s life did not begin with Korey, and as the opening of Grown showed, it will go on without him. His interruption of it, however, will change her in ways she would have never imagined. At first, she believes that’s a good thing, but the deeper Enchanted gets in a relationship with Korey, the stronger the hold he has on who she is, what she wears, and what she does becomes until she’s nothing but what he’s made.

Reading Grown comes with trigger warnings. It is a novel that explores sexual assault, coercion, abuse, and rape. Jackson doesn’t shy away from depicting people at their worst.

Sometimes, it’s your loved ones who fail you or refuse to understand the harm that has been done to you. Other times, it’s your loved ones who fight for you when the system has thrown you away. Jackson allows both situations to exist in Grown because it’s not a story concerned with perfect characters who react sympathetically and correctly to any and all circumstances.

We live in a rape culture that sweeps abuse and assault under the rug when it’s convenient or dealing with the reality of someone’s actions inconveniences us. It’s why people look the other way when their favorite celebrity does something egregious or require mountains of evidence to change their opinion when the smallest accusation would send them on a rant calling for justice when it’s a celebrity they despise.

There is, however, a particular disinterest in the safety and wellness of Black girls that Jackson makes a point of including in Grown. It’s what makes this novel a Black story not just through its author, protagonist, and the main cast of characters. It is impossible to read what happens to Enchanted without considering race and how it informs her world and the lack of significant intervention from the police despite her family’s repeated attempts to get her home.

Korey, like all predators, exploited the cracks in the Jones’ family dynamic to get what he wanted. Enchanted felt unheard at home. Her parents routinely dismissed her dream of becoming a singer whose songs lodge themselves in the hearts of her audience just like the legendary artists she’s grown up loving and singing along to. They wanted her to focus on her school work and extracurricular activities in order to secure a spot in a good college.

Most of her time outside of school was spent with her four younger siblings, taking care of them as her parents worked to keep a roof over their heads, their kids in school, and pay dues to the Will and Willow organization for Black youth in the area. Besides her best friend, Gabriela–a character whose depth and importance in the plot could have been better utilized–the only person Enchanted felt was on her side was Korey.

The twenty-eight-year-old R&B phenom who had been in the game since he was younger than Enchanted, listened to her, encouraged her talent, and supported her quest to make it in the industry. He was everything Enchanted wanted while simultaneously being empty of any real substance that didn’t come from her first which is Jackson’s point.

Predators fit themselves into the mold of who you most desire until your love for them sustains the relationship enough to trap you in a holding pattern waiting for that non-existent person to return.

Grown goes a level deeper by recognizing that abusers are often survivors of abuse themselves which is why it’s cyclical. It’s also why Jackson treats Korey as a person through Enchanted’s eyes. To dignify him with the excuse of monstrosity would be to erase the fact that it is people who victimize others. He is a person who uses his power and influence to harm others to satisfy an insecurity and wound in himself. He’s not a monster incapable of acting outside of his violent nature.

Korey’s actions are irredeemable and thus he is not redeemed. His death makes that clear and while the whodunit surrounding his murder is one of the least interesting things about Grown, there is power in Enchanted being the one who slowly reveals what she knows about that night.  She is in control of the narrative. In the end, it’s her voice that tells his fate while he lies voiceless.

Grown will be considered a product of the #MeToo era, a limiting categorization that some may use to dismiss its content as if this isn’t a familiar story about a teen girl who has been taken advantage of by someone she trusted.

The story hits close to home because what girl coming of age didn’t know someone, or who was friends with someone, in a relationship with a grown man? What TV shows or films didn’t romanticize these pairings? How much of our pop culture is riddled with high school girls dating men well into their twenties? How often is this depicted as okay or even simply handwaved?

Jackson–in a novel about abuse, mental health, murder, and the reclamation of a young girl’s voice–confronts her readers with this reality. This is not a single story about what happened to one girl. Grown is about what has happened to so many girls, what is continuing to happen. Enchanted survived. In reading about her and rooting for her, one can’t help but think about the girls that didn’t make it.

Grown is available now in print, audio, and e-book format. Let us know if you give it a look!