Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Jacob Have I Loved
Book Review: not appropriate for ten year olds....
Summary: 1 Stars
Our family bought this book on the strength of the Newbery Medal. After reading the first twelve chapters, we stopped abruptly because the story was not appropriate for our ten and eleven year olds. The combination of a fourteen year old girl, having a crush on a seventy year old man and an evil, evil, grandmother accusing her granddaughter of murder was too much. This book may be appropriate older teens, but the story line is contrived and does not ring true. Why the book received a Newbery Medal is a mystery to us.Book Review: review
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this was a very good book, which dealt with sibling rivalry very well. I won't summmarize the plot, because that's been done already, but it really delves deep into Louise's feelings. One of the main strengths of the book was that Caroline was not a bad person, she was actaully very sweet and smart and gifted. It made me wonder, if these people were real, and I had met them, if I would have also chosen Caroline over Loiuse. THat was one of the strengths of the book. IT would have been so easy for the author to just demonize Caroline, and she didn't. Also, I don't understand why everyone finds Louise's crush on 70 year old Hiram revolting. There were very few men on the island, and the only two who actually cared for her were Hiram, Call and her father. Looking at it that way, it's not surprising that she chose Hiram. I found this book a very compelling read, that explores emotion- hatred between siblings- that our society doesn't really allow children to feel. That it did it so eloquently only made the point stronger. This was a great book, and it's totally appropriate for children, because the eleven year old child you're trying to protect might actually be experiencing this issue themselves, and thinking it's abnormal. THis was a very good book.Book Review: this book have I loathed!
Summary: 1 Stars
This book have I loathed! The much-acclaimed coming-of-age story is set on an isolated Chesapeake Bay island in the early 1940s. The plot revolves around a supposed sibling rivalry between fraternal twin sisters: one is talented, generous, and graceful; the other is the narrator. The setting is appealing: a waterlogged island (called Rass Island in the book but much like real-life Tangier Island). Work on the island consists of fishing, crab hunting, and oyster "tonging." About 40 families live there.
Sounds like a decent premise for a historical novel, but the potential is corrupted by the author's failure to recognize one simple thing: readers have to identify or sympathize with the protagonist in order for a story to succeed.
Louise has never been happy. She describes her twin sister Caroline as "so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold" and herself as "all gray and shadow." A much better book would have resulted had the author chosen Caroline as the narrator. Instead, we look through the eyes of a petty, contemptuous, jealous, humorless, graceless loser who borders on being sociopathic. Louise "burns with fury" over Caroline's talent and social success. A typical reaction for her is to "fly into a wounded rage" and think thoughts like, "She [Caroline] ought to be on her knees thanking me for all I did for her." Louise also fantasizes about her sister being forced to "bow down" to her, and has night-time dreams of killing Caroline, of beating her to death. Once, when Caroline expresses worry over Louise's odd behavior, Louise-as-narrator says, "Her face was all concern, and I wanted to smack it."
Louise has one friend, an overweight boy named Call, whose social skills are worse than Louise's own. But she is not close to Call, whom she describes as "a good-hearted but second-rate person." She treats him with as much contempt as she treats her family. About her family, all Louise can say is, "I longed for the day when they would have to notice me, give me all the attention and concern that was my due." She labors under the delusion that her parents dislike her, never give her anything, favor Caroline unfairly and have always done so. Louise, who says she "hates" everyone at her school, suffers from a superiority complex utterly ungrounded in fact.
This is children's literature? But wait - it gets worse. 14-year-old Louise has a sexual awakening, and a 70-year-old man is the object of her fantasies. That's right - 70. Here's a sample: "Just looking at his hands was doing the same old things to the secret places of my body that holding him had done." The man is blind to his teenage neighbor's pathetic longings, but everyone else sees the infatuation and is disturbed by it.
This protagonist may legitimately be seen as an anti-hero. She is unattractive (bites her nails, has weather-roughened skin, and is rarely clean), petty, venal, sour, and querulous; she suffers from a severe case of malaise. The only person less attractive than this malcontent is her grandmother, a demented, sharp-tongued religious fanatic whose manners and words cause much stress in the household. It is she who quotes to Louise the title reference: "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated," from Romans 9:13. The book is laced with heavy-handed references to biblical characters, including Joseph and his brothers, Cain, David, Moses, Paul, and Stephen, references that for the most part have nothing to do with the plot or character development.
The story goes on exploring Louise's misery until about 30 pages from the end, and then there is an abrupt change: Louise leaves the island, goes to college, becomes a nurse midwife in Appalachia, and marries a widower with three children. So after all the unsettling details about Louise's discontent, we are now expected to buy her shift to earth mother? Please.
The book was showered with praise ("simply irresistible," written with "special brilliance") and awarded a Newbery medal, but I wouldn't give it to a teenager if someone paid me to do it.