The coming of age novel is traditionally a story of adolescence, where a first experience of love, sex, freedom, or “the other” is the gateway to maturity. In later life, the absence or departure of love, sex, or “the other” can trigger quite the same sort of transformation.

Myra, the central character in Montreal playwright Marianne Ackerman’s debut novel, is experiencing an unsettling freedom as her children depart the family home (a roomy, ramshackle apartment on Montreal’s Avenue de l’Esplanade, facing the mountain) and form adult attachments. Not that Myra has built her identity on momhood: she leads a busy, if impecunious, life as a journalist; she has opinions, affairs, and passionate friendships. As the novel opens, however, her ex-husband has had a nervous breakdown, her best friend needs a favour from a man who broke Myra’s heart, and the impending provincial referendum – the year is 1995 – is putting all her well-informed opinions to the test.

Those tempted to tune out at the prospect of more Quebec politics are advised to stay tuned in. The referendum, besides providing a bulletin board to which Myra pegs her own political analysis, is an excellent metaphor for changes in the lives of Jump’s characters. How many of us have made a huge decision, after a monumental buildup, only to find that, superficially, little has changed? Transformation occurs not in the outcome, but in the process, as feelings – for a relationship, a job, or a province – are confronted and clarified.

Ackerman’s self-referential plot (Myra’s best friend writes a bilingual play for his alternative theatre, just as the author did for hers) and deadly accurate social realism (much of Jump’s action takes place in haunts very familiar to a certain Montreal set) risk boring as many readers as they titillate. But her book engages because its people live and breathe. The central romance here is Myra’s love for Montreal, which Ackerman evidently shares. She has created sympathetic, troubled, interesting characters, just the sort whose hearts propel the city’s pulse.