Karma for Beginners

When I think back to my own life at fourteen, I remember what I consider to be a fairly average time- going to school, hanging out with friends, wearing ‘big’ hair (it was the late 80’s after all)- no significant enough worries to have negatively impacted my life 20-some odd years later. The protagonist in Jessica Blank’s new young adult novel, Karma for Beginners, sadly cannot make those claims. At fourteen, Tessa has more to worry about than most, from her self-absorbed mother to the constant moving around she has become accustomed to. Unfortunately, at the onset of the book, she’s on the precipice of an even darker time in her life than she can anticipate.

The character of Tessa’s mother is depicted only from Tessa’s perspective, so it’s difficult to fully assess her depth. From Tessa’s experiences, her mother has had a life full of attempts at happiness and many subsequent failures. Since a short-lived, and often volatile, relationship with Tessa’s dad, her mother has been reaching out for love and connection in the wrong directions, parading quite a few men through their lives, yet never finding a stable relationship. Finally swearing off men for good, her mother informs Tessa that they are going to live at an ashram in the Catskills, never concretely explaining what this new life will entail. Tessa is quite literally left on her own to figure out how to navigate this very different world- a world in which people assume new Sanskrit names, speak an essentially foreign language about their mind-altering experiences, and worship an orange-robed bearded man as their guru.

Eventually meeting an older boy who is not a part of the ashram community, who at twenty is technically a man, Tessa begins to go down her own path of uninformed choices, without the benefit of any stable or responsible adult role model in her life. As potentially destructive as Tessa’s choices are, including explorations in sex and drugs (and of course, rock and roll), the parallels between her actions and those of her mother are undeniable, as her mother seeks her own acceptance, love and definition in the religious cult.

The context of Karma for Beginners includes darker subject matter than I care to think about my own young children reading in the coming years, but it certainly could make for interesting discussions about teenage sexuality, relationships, trust and pressure between parents and adolescent children.

Dawn’s adult life is basically the same average picture as her adolescent years, except now she’s the one inexplicably in charge. Oh, and instead of the diary with a teeny lock, her stories exist on her blog, my thoughts exactly. No key needed.