Tea & A Good Book Brewing- Installment 39, Jacob Have I Loved

Here we are at the fourth Tuesday of the month already, and it is time to review September's book of the month (you might want to view that post again to see the special update I added today!)

As always, I would love to hear from others who have read this book, either recently or in the past! You should know that comments always make my day!!!

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Growing up is never the easiest proposition, and very few of us do it without our fair share of foibles, mistakes, and moments that are best described as downright awkward.

Sometimes I feel bad for young people. Not because I relish  growing old, and not because I feel that I have all the answers to life and that they have none, but because the decisions and pressures that bombard youth are just plain down difficult by times.

Youth is finally the time when we are faced with the choice of what we're going to do with what we've been given, whether that has been good or bad, and our future course in life is largely charted by the decisions that are made during this crucial time.

It is both thrilling and frightening to experience and watch it.

Jacob Have I Loved is a growing up story. And to make the process of growing up all the more difficult, is the fact that the main protagonist, Louise, had a twin sister who was younger, but outshone her in just about every way. Or at least in the ways that Louise thought mattered.

Sibling rivalry is a common affliction, and with twins I wonder if maybe both the bonds and strains that come with blood ties aren't even more pronounced?

In this story, Louise says that none of the things she did with her twin, like sharing the same room, eating at the same table and being in the same classroom, had made them close. And yet, she muses, if they were not close, how did Caroline have the power to slice her through to the bone with a single glance?

What has gone wrong? How could twins not be close?

As we meet the different characters in the book, mainly Louise's parents, her grandmother who lives with them, a boy named Call, who Louise goes progging for crabs with, and the Captain, who returns to the island after many days away, some of the pieces fall into place...

Louise feels that she was neglected since birth, since Caroline was the sickly one that required special attention from the beginning. Louise feels that Caroline gets all the attention even now since she has a great singing voice that wows the whole island. And then, as the ultimate climax when they are older and Caroline has already gone off the island to study music, she marries the man who Louise fancies herself in love with.

Were Louise's feelings of being "the hated one" justified?

In considering that, I would have to say that there were times when the people around her certainly gave her reason to feel that she was the moon compared to Caroline's sun, but there are glimpses of the other side, too, particularly from her parents and the Captain, where we see for certain that they love her just as much as her sister and that anything she is seeing to the contrary has come from her own preconceived notions and imagination.

It's a scary thing to watch Louise drift away from God, and other important family relationships because of an accumulation of hurts and the overall sense that God is against her, and I wanted badly for there to be a satisfactory ending of redemption.

The end of the book goes rather quickly, with Louise suddenly grown up and working as a nurse-midwife in the mountains of West Virginia. but within those final pages I see what I am looking for. At least in part.

The trouble with me when I write stories, is that I want everything to turn out perfect. I want to smooth the troubled brow, so to speak, and see all the wrongs righted.

I want to see happily-ever-after.

The problem is that life just isn't that neat and tidy. Yes, there are victories, and yes, God does part the red sea, but between the lines there are still the frayed seams of our lives that need ongoing redemption and healing.

If it is that way in real life, then certainly it should be that way in fictitious books as well, and I can accept that with Jacob Have I Loved.

But if you should find me writing the perfect ending, just know that I am doing it because I can in stories, and not so easily in real life.

It's called author's liberties. And I am pretty sure it's what God wants to do with each of us, if we'll only let him.