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Neon Jane

by Maia Evrigenis
Neon Jane

FILLING THE GAP between the experience of the sick and those living healthy lives in remission, Neon Jane follows twenty-four-year-old Maia’s journey to move forward from her childhood cancer experience as she is haunted by a spunky, ghostlike, thirteen-year-old cancer patient named Jane.

The two have an inseparable bond and complicated friendship as Maia takes on the role of Jane’s caretaker. Representing Maia as a child, Jane pressures Maia to be a better, more successful person in the name of childhood cancer. Maia argues back through personal reflections about cancer’s ongoing presence in her healthy adult life, and her struggle to move forward from the experience.

As Maia looks for a genetic explanation for her previous cancer, she uncovers the story of her uncle Jason, a famous baroque musician who drowned in his twenties. Through her uncle’s story and new complications with Jane’s health, Maia contemplates what it means to live a full life, and whether it is time to let go of the cancer experience that has defined her for so long.

Pages: 104
Pub Date: 05-17-2022
Softcover: 13.95 9781646636587
Hardcover: 22.95 9781646636600

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The reviews are in…

  • "Savvy and unflinching, brave in all its forms, Neon Jane shows us with startling emotional clarity that you don't have to conform to tell a story that matters. And Neon Jane is all about mattering, at our most material, vital, cellular levels, making space for a new kind of resiliency, a narrative we as humans so desperately need. To wit: Neon Jane is a whip smart, incandescent, takeover of a debut, hosted by two sage, wily, and immediately-indispensable characters--voices who make you equally cackle and cry, who are old before their years and too young for all they are tasked with surviving. Were you to pick any traveling companions, any IV-toting philosophers, anyone to grit out the road ahead with, Maia and her pink-haired counterpart Neon Jane should no doubt be the ones. That is, if they'd have you, and you'd better hope they do. I can think of no fictive friends more necessary, more real, or more frank, which is the magic of fiction--if you're only courageous enough to go there. Maia Evrigenis is. Take note, world, and hold onto your wigs."


    -Jess Arndt, author of Large Animals

  • "Among the great gifts literature gives us is the chance to linger with other voices, as those voices talk to themselves and their worlds come true. In Maia Evrigenis' lucid and convivial Neon Jane this is literalized to great effect. In this book the narrator-also named Maia-finds herself ghost-companioned by Jane, a 13-year old pink-wigged version of her own past self. Jane's neon wig is a sign that she is still undergoing the same harsh, toxic cancer treatments Maia herself had undergone for her own severe childhood illness. As Maia contends with-and cares for-the equally charming and combative Jane she comes into the fullness of her own life all while reckoning with the social and personal meanings of childhood cancer and its treatments. As a reader I was deeply grateful to be invited along for the ride."


    -Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands

  • "Eminently creative and memorably unique, Neon Jane marks the beginning of a literary career that merits close attention."


    -Greg Fields, author of Arc of the Comet and Through the Waters and the Wild

Maia Evrigenis is a writer from Sacramento, California. Her flash fiction piece "Sanitize" from Neon Jane was selected for the Best Small Fictions 2021 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She was a Stories on Stage winner for the 2020 writing contest in Northern California and is featured in the anthology Twenty Twenty: A Stories on Stage Sacramento Anthology. Her writing has been published in Necessary Fiction, The Black Fork Review, Arkana Literary Journal, The Sacramento News and Review, and The Sacramento Bee. Maia received her MFA in creative writing from CalArts and BS in applied psychology from New York University.

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