Jacob Have I Loved

I have read this book several times and every time I come away feeling a little bit differently about it. I think I'm starting to understand it more, but I still think there is something else there and that this is one book I may always learn from.

It's the story of Louise, a girl growing up on Rass Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Louise is adventurous, tomboyish, and has always felt unloved because of her twin sister Caroline. When people tell the story of their birth, everyone talks about how Caroline didn't breathe at first and was in the hospital for such a long time, but no one seems to remember where Louise was. When they had whooping cough as children, their mother thinks Louise got sick enough to need a tent, but everyone on the island remembers that Captain Billy had to be woken in the middle of the night to ferry Caroline to the hospital. Louise is the only one who ended up with scars from chicken pox. When Louise asked whether she was a good baby, her grandmother (who had been her caretaker while Caroline was in the hospital) said she couldn't remember, and her mother said, "You were a good baby, Louise. You never gave us a minute's worry." Louise says, "She meant it to comfort me, but it only distressed me further. Shouldn't I have been at least a minute's worry? Wasn't it all the months of worry that had made Caroline's life so dear to them?"

Caroline is beautiful, talented, cheerful...she's the kind of sister that everyone thinks is great until she's their own sister. Jacob Have I Loved begins the summer they were thirteen. Everyone has a rough time at some point during their teen years, but most of us don't have a "perfect" twin to make it seem even worse. That summer, Louise and her best friend Call meet the Captain, a man who lived on the island when he was young and has just come back.

It seems like the beginning of the perfect summer, but then Caroline starts to befriend both Call and the Captain. For Louise, who feels like she's always had so little to herself, it's the end of her rope. She angrily starts closing off her heart from her friends and family, and it gets even worse when her grandmother (who Louise takes too seriously because she doesn't realize the old lady is suffering from dementia) quotes Romans 9:13 to her, which says "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Louise looks up the verse, sees that it's God talking, and decides that since Caroline seems to get everything good, God must have decided to hate Louise even before she was born. The book does end on a happier note, but I'm determined not to give away any endings in my posts so you'll have to read it yourself to find out what happens.

I think the book is a very interesting look at sibling rivalry and family communication. If Louise had realized her grandmother was mentally ill, she wouldn't have listened to her so seriously and been so upset about everything she said. Louise is overly sensitive to other people's remarks (which is common at 13!) and blows things out of proportion, which just ends up making her miserable. All of us do that to some extent as teenagers, but Jacob Have I Loved shows a girl who takes that to such an extent that she almost misses the chance to change.

It's a good book for teens because it's about a girl dealing with the same frustrations and emotions that they feel, and it's a good book for the rest of us because it reminds us of how we felt during that time and can perhaps make us a little more patient and understanding.