A Post-#MeToo Novel That’s Fresh & Revelatory
When the four members of the Greenberg Blum family move from bustling, artistic, and diverse Brooklyn to rural Maine, they expect to face the typical challenges that come with significant change—from city to country, from culturally comfortable to cultural minority. But none of them could have been prepared for having their fam- ily catapulted into the center of a divisive public scandal about sexual harassment, grooming, and consent.
In her debut novel, Hazel Says No, Jessica Berger Gross jumps between the minds of her characters with attention not only to their distinct voices but to their unique stages of life. The Blum kids’ priorities are emblematic of their adolescence: eighteen-year-old Hazel is determined to get into Vassar (and eventually become a respected writer), while her younger brother, Woolf, is concerned with landing a part in the school play while surviving in the lion’s den that is middle school. Meanwhile, their parents, Gus and Claire, are trying to reestablish their professional worlds as they support their family’s acclimation to country living. The benign nature of each family member’s desires and the colloquiality of Gross’s writing adds humor and layers of relatability to the novel.
But the idyllic setting of small-town Maine and a playful narrative voice belie a serious story. On her first day of school, Hazel Blum is sexually propositioned by the school principal. Despite Principal White’s quid-pro-quo tactics, Hazel confidently and emphatically says no to his advances and storms out of his office before the situation escalates. Hazel is horrified: by predatory Principal White, but also with her parents for uprooting her life, and with herself for not being able to move past the encounter. Hazel just wants to put her head down and pretend nothing ever happened, but within days the incident becomes public, and the Greenberg Blum family, already outsiders, become the new faces of Riverburg’s largest public controversy.
Despite victim-blaming and he-said- she-said backlash from classmates, parents, and neighbors, throughout the story Hazel learns that her voice is powerful, and, eventually, people want to listen to her. But she also discovers that being extraordinary has a price, and that it might not be so terrible to be an ordinary teenager. This novel captures the importance of holding on to the people who build us up. The relationships between the women of the novel, whether they are family, friends, colleagues, or strangers, are its core, and a joy to read, their interactions filled with care, understanding, and patience.
The Greenberg Blum family’s Jewishness is central to understanding how otherness and safety operate thematically. In an early chapter, Woolf observes that being Jewish is “weird” in Maine. Otherness quickly takes a turn from weird to dangerous, when the Greenberg Blum family’s safety is threatened with anonymous antisemitic notes and vandalism. The book’s concern with safety, whether that is the safety to be Jewish or feel comfortable in school, brings into question what we can/should shelter our children, or even our parents, from.
Hazel Says No is a post-MeToo novel that remains hauntingly relevant. As she grows up in its pages, Hazel helps us see that the bad things that happen to us, no matter how terrible, don’t need to define us. A survivor’s story is solely her own—only she gets to choose if to share it, how to share it, and with whom to share it.
Jocelyn Lewis is an intern at Lilith and a dance educator in the New York area.
