Jacob Have I Loved

Now that I finished the book, I can't say I particularly liked the main characters or the plot. Also the pacing skipped around timeline-wise sometimes, especially at the end, when things happened but as a sidenote that made them feel so much more distanced than I would have liked. But the writing was so well researched, so detailed in the world building, so compelling that I couldn't help but be drawn in and actively want to continue reading.

Caroline is beautiful, musically gifted, and good; she is the shining star of a small town on the water. The story is told by her twin sister Louise, who is almost sick with jealousy and longing. Louise is not a flawless person, but I loved her just the same: her work-roughened hands, her terrible puns, her puzzlement at her anger when a friend falls in love with her sister. It's a good book about complicated family relationships, and Paterson never pulls back on showing the truth of it. In the end, both sisters manage to break free and become their own people.

A coming of age story, somehow both blunt and sensitive, about one girl's growing up on the Chesapeake.

The back of my book says, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated....” With her grandmother's taunt, Louise knew that she, like the biblical Esau, was the despised elder twin. Caroline, her selfish younger sister, was the one everyone loved. Perceiving the unjustness of her grandmother, this colors her reactions within all her other relationships, as Louise nurses those perceptions and misperceptions, creating for herself a harder childhood than it needed to have been. In the end, those things she learned in her youth stood her in good stead for her calling in life.

Katherine Paterson does an excellent job of setting, show more characterization and story. show less

I have heard of this classic for decades, but not only never read it, but was totally mistaken about its essence. I thought this 1981 Newbery Award winner was about an American or English girl falling in love with a German prisoner of war, the titular Jacob. Nothing could be further from the truth! I clearly am mistaking it for some other award-winning middle-grade novel.

Louise Bradshaw lives in the shadow of blonde, talented, beautiful, sweet twin sister Caroline. Caroline, having nearly died at birth, has been delicate and cosseted ever since — much to her plainer, more awkward sister’s jealousy. The twins live in a remove Chesapeake Bay island called Rass Island with their boatman father, their schoolteacher-turned-housewife show more mother and their hellfire-and-brimstone Methodist grandmother. (I was a member of the United Methodist Church through three decades and never heard such. Times have changed!) The story begins in 1942 when Louise is 14 and continues through World War II and into the 1950s. Louise finds her way, but I won’t spoil it by saying anything more. What I can say is that I loved the book, but I am surprised that, as harsh as it is, that tweens love it as well. Adults, the novel well deserves its Newbery Award, but those younger than 13 or 14, caveat emptor. show less

her books always give me such a feeling of weight, of something squeezing the breath out of me, and this one is the heaviest so far, i think: the terrible loneliness of it, the suffocating confines of a little island where everybody knows everyone and there's no space for any difference, the jealousy, the terrible, heavy want to be loved, to be known. i loved how there was no catharsis, no magical moment of being right with the world, just sort of grim, terrified hanging on until managing to let yourself go, finally, for your sake and not others'. i'm not quite sure how to feel about the ending, about recreating the same closed-off space you ran from - though it probably says more about me than sarah - and would it be enough, and would show more her own children be telling same story sometime down the line - but even so, getting there was a relief, an exhale: she survived herself. what's more to ask? show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2214674.html

I didn't quite know what to expect. I was braced for another Terabithia, a closely observed portrait of childhood friendship disrupted by a gut-wrenching plot development near the end. In fact it's very different - Jacob Have I Loved is a story of sibling rivalry, or rather of how the narrator is completely overshadowed by her twin sister. Where the relative normality of the families in Terabithia were a reassuring anchor for the narrative, here the awfulness of Louise's family surroundings, which start bad and keep getting worse, actually makes one almost wish for a Terabithia-style climax. The actual happy ending felt a bit rushed and tacked-on, part of a different story.

But it's still show more beautifully observed. In the BBC radio series Clare in the Community, there's a hilarious moment in episode 3.2 where Clare's mother is bewildered by Clare's resentment of her sister: "We always were careful to treat them both the same - the plain one and the pretty one!" Jacob Have I Loved isn't a comedy; it's a great portrayal of a despairing teenager, isolated in her own family, which itself is on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay, and how she finally gets away. show less

Not at all what I was expecting (not sure what I was expecting, but not this!) ... it reminded me in many ways of Little Women, believe-it-or-not. At one point it lurched in a horrifying plot direction, but veered back again, phew, and proceeded in ways I could get behind. Not funny enough, moving enough, suspenseful enough, etc., to warrant the rare 5 stars, but this really was a terrifically-written book.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).