JACOB HAVE I LOVED

(By Katherine Paterson) My pick for book club, because can you believe I had never read it? Despite the fact that it takes place during WWII and on an island? I think as a child I sensed that it would contain precious little of my favorite reading fodder: animals and nature, cozy food descriptions, rugged survival narratives, magic/alternate worlds, historical settings, or charming hijinks of precocious youngsters. The cover, with its windswept young woman staring moodily out to sea, smacked of Bleak Realism and Tough Teen Issues, topics I tended to avoid. And in a way, I was right. This is a classic and well-written book, but I probably wouldn’t have liked it back then and didn’t fall in love with it as an adult either. My favorite part was actually the last chapter or so, when Sara Louise grows up and becomes a midwife in a mining town and finally gets over her issues. That could have been an entire book unto itself!