Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone

Keller, Tae.  Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone. Yearling, 2023.

Pages: 304

Age Range: grades 7-9  

Genre: realistic fiction; a touch of science fiction 

Setting: Norwell Florida, a small town that Mallory refers to as Nowhereville.

Themes: friendship; betrayal, loss of a parent; belonging, lack of belonging, bullying       

Merits: The characters are very relatable with perhaps the exception of Jennifer Chan.  The need to belong while not being a good person is very real, and coming to the choice of being a good person and lacking popularity or being a popular bad person is very convincing.

Unique Quality: 

Detractors: Jennifer Chan’s character is not always believable since she is convinced there are aliens.  However, when the reader delves into the reason for her beliefs and the loss of her father, the story makes more sense.

Main Characters:

Mallory “Mal” Moss - the narrator who desires popularity with her two other friends, Reagan and Tess.  She meets her new neighbor, Jennifer Chan, and actually likes her despite her odd obsession with aliens and that being friends with her will kill her own popularity.

Tess - the leader of the friend group who ends every sentence as though it is a question.  She is popular and will hurt anyone who she sees as unimportant.

Reagan - a member of the friend group is closer to Mal.  She has secrets that she’s shared with Mal but not Tess about her homelife. Her mother died, and she tells people that it had to do with being struck by lightning in a meteor shower.  She actually just left them. Reagan’s dad is aloof, and Reagan feels very alone.

Jennifer Chan - the new move in next door who knows an African form of karate.  Rumors fly before her arrival about why she left her last school which involves her harming someone with her karate skills.  In actuality her father died, and a new start is needed by the family.  Jennifer is excited to move, especially to Florida where there is so much connection to space history; she is obsessed with finding aliens.  She believes they are real and out there and just need to communicate with her.

Jennifer’s mom - wants the best for her daughter yet also wants her to fit in and stop the alien research.

Mal’s parents - they can see that Mal has become withdrawn in the last few years, but she doesn’t share her feelings.  Mom often lectures about being a good person.

Ingrid and Kath - these two non popular down to earth characters used to be Mal’s friends, but she abandoned them to be popular.  Ironically, they are the two who actually help Mal to find Jennifer. 

Plot:

Mal would like to think that she is happy.  She has popular friends and she is popular.  Yet she doesn’t always feel good about herself. 

The new neighbors move in, and Mom makes Mal accompany her to greet them since Mal and Jennifer are the same age.  Jennifer seems excited to meet Mal, who is rather cool in the greeting.  Jennifer shares her love of aliens and discusses her research to locate them.  Although Mal knows befriending Jennifer will kill her popularity, she can’t help but be intrigued by her a bit.  She’s so confident and straightforward.  Mal tries to give Jennifer some advice about fitting in, but Jennifer seems oblivious to why that matters.  She entrusts Mal with one of her precious journals where she writes about her alien research.  

Jennifer first sits in the cafeteria with Ingrid and Kath, but that lasts only a few days.  Later it is revealed that Ingrid had been bullied the year before, and she didn’t want to draw that kind of attention to herself again by being near Jennifer.

Eventually, the school bully asks Jennifer to demonstrate her karate, and she explains its African origins and how despite being enslaved, the Africans used this karate form to find beauty in movement.  The bully is impressed by a kick she does and asks for me. Jennifer tells him that she’s not there to do tricks and that the karate is not used for that.  Mal is impressed that Jennifer stood up to the bully but also knows that she just committed social suicide.

Jennifer soon becomes a target to Mal’s friends.  They snap pictures of her looking terrible and text each other about how much of a loser she is.  Mal tries not to participate, but ends up also taking pictures.  She doesn’t like being a bad person, but she just can’t seem to help it.

The girls plan the ultimate humiliation.  They arrange a meeting with Jennifer in a downstairs bathroom, and in front of her, they mock her and tear up the journal that had been lent to Mal.  That night, Jennifer disappears. 

Jennifer is gone for days. The entire community is searching for her. Meanwhile, Mal is riddled with guilt. She likes Jennifer.  Why did she do these things?  Does she really feel better when hanging out with Reagan and Tess?  She does not.

Mal approaches Kath and Ingrid who remind her how she dumped them.  She tells them about Jennifer’s love of aliens and has ideas of what happened to her.  Jennifer wanted to contact them, so Mal thinks she needed to communicate somehow. The girls sneak into Jennifer’s house, take her journals, and read them.  They finagle a way into the radio station to try to use the radio signals, and they get a partial response in Morse Code.  They are interrupted by the secretary who is so angry they violated her trust; they had not been supposed to touch anything!  Mal finally reads Jennifer’s last entry - Mal had picked up all of the torn notebook pages and reassembled them. It was then that she remembered Jennifer talking about seeing crop circles in a park, and suddenly, Mal knows how to find Jennifer.  She enlists Reagan because she can drive as well as Kath and Ingrid, who don’t fully forgive her for her part in humiliating Jennifer.  Mom and Dad catch the girls when Reagan runs over the Moss’s mailbox, and then they take the girls to the park.  Mom and Dad want Mal to trust them, and that means they must trust her, even after she revealed her part in what had happened to Jennifer. 

Jennifer is at the park; she has climbed up high onto the radio tower’s spire, and without hesitation, Mal climbs up after her.  Mal apologizes, and Jennifer jokes but is uncertain of Mal’s intentions.  Jennifer also accepts that no one is going to answer her, and in that moment, Jennifer falls.

A broken leg and bruises follow along with a visit from Mal where they talk and Mal explains that what she did was not “personal.”  Although Jennifer can’t see any of this as not personal, she does understand that Mal made a mistake, and that people deserve a second chance.