Quick Stats
Age Rating: 14+
Over All: 4 stars
Plot: 3.5/5
Characters: 4/5
Setting: 4/5
Writing: 5/5
Disability Rep: 3/5

Special thanks to Simon Teen and NetGalley for an eARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions reflected in this review are my own.

I love Jenn Bennett. I’ve read and loved all of her YA books, and though Always Jane isn’t my favorite of her books, it’s no exception.
There was a lot going on with this book. Jane is dealing with being back in the place where she had a serious injury, some familial stuff with her dad and Mad Dog (her employer), a absentee boyfriend who isn’t who she thought she was, and more. Fen has a whole bus load of familial baggage, and a fair share of unrealistic expectations of Jane.
I liked the book and the relationship in the sense that it was dramatic and fun and a good read, but it was also highly dysfunctional and toxic in a way that was never fully addressed. Fen was a tad melodramatic, and I think he made Jane out to be this dream girl destined for him—his living dead girl, his Ophelia—in a way that was… not healthy and never exactly called out. They danced around it, but I do wish it had been more directly addressed.
However, as dysfunctional as it all was, every character was loveable and relateable and so well written. I couldn’t help but enjoy the book, and I flew through it.

There is disability rep, too. Jane has aphasia from a near-drowning (or a drowning? She was dead for a second, I don’t know the technical term). It’s a side effect of her head injury that sort of makes words tricky for her to grasp. The book mainly focuses on the forgetting of words as she speaks. Jane calls it her word-pixie, who flits around in her head and steals words from her memories as she tries to speak them. I liked the way Jane addressed this and interacted with it. I think it felt realistic. The book also touched on having issues with understanding long strings of talking. How at the end of a long sentence or paragraph that someone was saying, the words started to lose meaning and it became hard to understand and remember, later on. She mentioned that this made written directions much more accessible than spoken ones. However, this is only touched on like, twice. Jane mentions it when she first explains aphasia to the reader, and it’s briefly mentioned one or two times in passing later in the book. We never get to see it play out, and that disappointed me a little, because I feel as if that would be a big part of living with that disorder, and seeing her have to accommodate that would have been nice. However, I’m not too put out that it didn’t happen.
My main issue with the rep were some throwaway lines here and there. People—Jane, Fen, friends, family—were constantly clarifying that Jane is “all there” and putting a lot of emphasis on the fact that she’s not “too intellectually disabled”, or something. And that is just… not helpful. It adds to the stigma against people with other mental disabilities such as autism, and makes it out like Jane is superior to people who have more intellectual challenges than her. There were a few other types of throwaway ableism—both against Jane and generally against people who are more disabled than Jane.
The book portrayed Jane in a good light, and as far as I can tell (I don’t have aphasia or a TBI, so please defer to own voices reviewers), had positive representation of her disability. It just also made some ableist remarks, as well. So I feel kind of conflicted on that point, because I doubt the author intended it. There is just so much casual ableism of this type in our world, and we need to point it out when we see it.